Burnt Finance, an NFT auction protocol built on the Solana [SOL] blockchain has announced securing an $8 million A round series spearheaded by Hong-kong based Animoca Brands. Other investors who took part in the funding drive were Multicoin Capital, Alameda Research, DeFiance, Valor Capital Group, Figment, Spartan Capital, Tribe Capital, Play Ventures, HashKey, Mechanism Capital, DeFi Alliance, Terra, among others.
Apart from that, Burnt Finance will now launch its native NFT marketplace, intending to be a ‘hub for NFTs by integrating DeFi functionality, such as NFT lending, liquidity mining with staking incentives, fractionalization, and GameFi’. In accordance with the P.R, this will enable permissionless access to NFTs and claims to have low fees and fast speeds, with 160k users on its waitlist. It also claims to have processed over $100 million of trading volume in 7 days on its Spark testnet.
According to data provided by DappRadar, in 2021, the global market for non-fungible tokens has skyrocketed to around $22 billion. Legacy auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s have also entered into the NFT domain. In December 2021 alone, NFT sales charted $4 billion. Just like its counterparts, Burnt Finance is also aiming to reap the benefits.
Competitors include OpenSea, SuperRare, Rarible, and NiftyGateway. Even though Burnt is an early entrant, it’s hoping to pose a challenge to the larger players by using popular blockchain like Solana and going for the DeFi space. One of the best-performing cryptocurrencies in 2021, SOL’s DeFi projects crossed US$3 billion in September 2021.
Solana’s DeFi projects brief overview
In just two years, the layer-1 protocol has attracted a wealth of developer talent and has evolved to support over 350 projects, many of which are focused on decentralized finance [DeFi], NFTs, and Web3. Last week, the team behind one of Solana’s biggest projects is in the middle of a $100 million fundraising deal to expand operations. As a matter of fact, SOL’s DeFi major Serum’s Incentive ecosystem has committed $70 million.
Two weeks prior, another DeFi protocol built on the layer-1 blockchain is Exotic Markets that raised $5 million in a private token sale co-led by Multicoin and Ascensive Assets. The funding arrives as Solana maintained its position among the top five in the DeFi TVL charts,