Original Title: "Order Book + AMM? Kuru Labs Raises $11.5M to Power EVM Native Chain Monad"

Original Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

The structural bottleneck of on-chain transaction experience is gradually becoming apparent. Although the AMM model has driven the development of early decentralized exchanges, its limitations in terms of liquidity utilization efficiency, price discovery mechanism, and limit order support have always kept on-chain trading distinct from centralized exchanges. On the other hand, while the CLOB model offers greater flexibility and accuracy, it has long been constrained by public chain performance and on-chain execution costs, making it difficult to truly land.

On July 7, decentralized exchange Kuru Labs on Monad Layer 1 announced the completion of an $11.5 million Series A financing round, led by Paradigm, with participation from 0xDesigner, Viktor Bunin, Zagabond, Tristan Yver, Kevin Pang, Will Price, Alex Watts, Jordan Hagan, 3nes, Shreyas Hariharan, Auri, and Joe Takayama as angel investors.

Kuru Labs is dedicated to building a full-chain trading platform on the high-performance Layer 1 blockchain Monad, combining an order book architecture with automated market maker logic. The project aims to provide a more balanced product path for both professional traders and ordinary users through a fundamental restructuring of the underlying architecture.

Project Background

Kuru Labs is a startup focused on building an on-chain order book trading platform, founded in 2024 by a team with experience in high-frequency trading, DeFi protocol development, and on-chain system optimization. The project aims to create a decentralized trading platform that is fully blockchain-native and features both an order book and automated market maker functionality. Kuru's vision is not about taking shortcuts from existing architectures but starting from the ground up, combining the strengths of the existing two mainstream models to on-chain replicate a spot trading system experience closer to that of centralized exchanges.

In terms of funding, Kuru completed a seed round financing in mid-2024, raising $2 million, with Electric Capital as the lead investor. Brevan Howard Digital, CMS Holdings, Pivot Global, Breed, and Velocity Capital also participated in this round of financing, along with angel investors Keone Hon, Jarry Xiao, and Eugene Chen. This round of financing is mainly used to build the technical team, develop the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and prepare for the testing phase.

The Kuru team announced the completion of its Series A funding round, totaling $11.5 million, led by Paradigm. Kuru co-founder Vaibhav Prakash stated that Paradigm has played an active role in building the on-chain market microstructure. The team plans to use the Series A funding to further expand the team and resources needed and realize the vision of a fully on-chain order book on the Monad mainnet.

Technical Architecture and Product Design

Kuru did not follow the current mainstream decentralized exchange's AMM model but instead attempted to build a hybrid system that combines an order book with automated market-making functionality. The core idea is to introduce a default automated market-making algorithm into the on-chain order book for each trading pair, allowing users to receive basic quote support even in the absence of active liquidity providers. This design, compared to a traditional order book, does not rely on centralized market makers to maintain market liquidity, nor does it impose a uniform constraint on the price curve like AMMs. Instead, it provides the possibility of flexible switching between the two.

In terms of operation, Kuru has designed an order management mechanism suitable for the on-chain environment. The submission and cancellation of limit orders incur low and predictable gas costs, allowing market makers or arbitrageurs to operate frequently without being hindered by high costs. The team is also developing a passive liquidity mechanism that enables ordinary users to support liquidity through a strategy contract without managing orders. This approach aims to lower the participation threshold and increase the capital coverage of the on-chain order book.

Technically, Kuru has chosen the Monad blockchain as the deployment platform. Monad is a Layer 1 blockchain compatible with the Ethereum EVM. It is currently in the testing phase, with the second stage of the June testnet having validator nodes online, including 161 validator nodes from 33 countries and 64 cities.

Monad Labs was founded by several former Jump Trading developers. In April 2024, the company completed a $225 million funding round, also led by Paradigm, with participation from Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, GSR Ventures, Greenoaks, and other companies. Monad Labs had previously raised $9 million in seed pre-seed funding in May 2022, followed by a $10 million seed round in December 2022, and later raised $19 million in funding led by Dragonfly Capital.

Unlike existing EVM-based public chains, Monad did not simply copy the Ethereum code but instead restructured the execution engine from the ground up, implementing a parallel architecture and pipeline scheduling mechanism to increase transaction processing speed and reduce block latency. Internal test data shows that Monad can achieve a processing speed of 10,000 TPS in a controlled environment and maintain a one-second block time. Leveraging this foundational performance, Kuru is building a fully on-chain, scalable matching system. Because Monad supports EVM bytecode, Kuru is also able to interoperable with development tools and user-facing products in the Ethereum ecosystem, reducing migration costs.

Although the technical architecture is somewhat cutting-edge, Kuru still faces real-world limitations. The Monad mainnet has not yet launched, and its chain-level performance and network stability have not been validated in a public environment. The design of Kuru's product heavily relies on the real-time and predictability of on-chain transactions. If Monad fails to deliver as scheduled, it will directly impact the platform's launch schedule and the feasibility of its core functionality.

Ecosystem Outlook and Uncertainties

The hybrid order book model developed by Kuru is currently in the early stages of market validation. This model attempts to provide a new on-chain option between existing AMMs and centralized order books, making market-making behaviors closer to traditional trading systems while maintaining the openness and composability of decentralized protocols. In an ideal state, this architecture can not only cover mainstream trading pairs but also serve long-tail assets, thus providing a unified trading infrastructure for various asset types.

The team maintains a relatively optimistic outlook on market opportunities. On the one hand, the trading logic of the on-chain order book is more in line with the trading habits of professional market makers and institutional investors; on the other hand, with the support of high-performance infrastructure like Monad, execution efficiency may be significantly improved, allowing models that could only run on centralized exchanges to operate on-chain for the first time. Additionally, due to Monad's compatibility with the Ethereum developer ecosystem, Kuru can more easily attract existing developers to integrate their trading components, leaving ample room for product expansion.

However, there are still several uncertainties at this stage. Firstly, there is a risk of technical realization. Although the design goals of Monad are attractive, there is still a gap between the whitepaper and the actual operating environment. Multiple dimensions such as on-chain throughput, transaction confirmation, node synchronization, etc., may become limiting factors. Secondly, the actual driving force of user migration. Currently, the majority of on-chain transaction users have already formed habits of using AMM platforms, and persuading them to switch to the order book model is not easy. While Kuru supports a simplified liquidity participation mechanism in theory, the actual effects still require observation over time.

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