Ellipsis Labs Raises $21M to Launch 'Verifiable Finance Blockchain' Atlas

Ellipsis Labs, the team behind the Solana-based decentralized exchange Phoenix, has raised $21 million from Haun Ventures to launch Atlas, a new blockchain purpose-built for what is being termed, "verifiable finance."

Co-founders Eugene Chen and Jarry Xiao, who have backgrounds in high-frequency trading, founded Ellipsis Labs in 2022. According to a statement from Haun Ventures, their "key insight" was that "high-performance financial products can rival traditional finance without sacrificing transparency, auditability or censorship resistance."

Ellipses aims to address key problems in DeFi, like inefficient price discovery and high transaction costs, which make it difficult for decentralized finance platforms to compete with traditional financial systems. Phoenix, their order book-style exchange on Solana, has already facilitated over $50 billion in trades since its 2023 launch, according to data from DefiLlama.

Ellipsis says it plans to apply its learnings from building Phoenix to Atlas, a new network that will reportedly feature ultra-low fees and will be built for high transaction throughput.

Initially launching as a layer-2 solution on Ethereum, Atlas is designed to plug into both Ethereum and Solana’s liquidity pools. Key features will include low-latency transaction processing, reliable oracle updates, and robust sequencing for non-custodial, on-chain price discovery, according to Haun Ventures.

Haun Ventures started up in 2022 and is named after founder Katie Haun, a former federal prosecutor, Coinbase executive and Andreessen Horowitz partner. The firm's $20 million Ellipsis investment was joined by an additional $1 million from other investors, bringing the total funding round to $21 million.

Haun Ventures called the round a "fast-follow" to Ellipsis Labs’ $20 million Series A, which closed in April and was led by the venture capital firm Paradigm.