Membrane Labs, a trading and lending platform focused on cryptocurrency, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round, with participation from big names like Brevan Howard Digital and Point72 Ventures. The money will be utilized to develop the type of trading infrastructure needed to secure the crypto market in order to avoid further disasters.
Crypto trading and lending platforms in the past year dropped to pieces, revealing a chaotic mess of opaque and iniquitous operations carried on behind the scenes. The response from regulators will see Crypto come into the daylight and map much closer to traditional finance.
Membrane started out by building a clearing, netting and settlement engine, said Carson Cook, the company's CEO. This allowed institutions to choose where and how they guard their funds, whether that's a custodian or multi-party computation MPC wallet, and then separately have their front office determine where and how they execute trades.
The knee jerk reaction to last year's blowups is to move everything on-chain and lean hard into a decentralized finance type of infrastructure. This is understandable and it makes sense, he said, but it won't fit for all institutions.
re used to taking on that settlement risk with other desks or other institutions, Cook said.