Kuru Labs completes $11.5 million Series A financing to build a full-chain order book trading platform

Kuru Labs recently announced the completion of a $11.5 million Series A financing round, led by a well-known investment institution with participation from several industry insiders. Kuru Labs is dedicated to building a full-chain trading platform that combines order book architecture with automated market-making logic on an emerging high-performance blockchain, aiming to provide a more balanced trading experience for different types of users through the reconstruction of its underlying architecture.

Kuru Labs was established 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 entirely based on blockchain and features both order book and automated market-making functionalities. Kuru's vision is not to take shortcuts from existing frameworks, but to start from the ground up, combining the advantages of the two mainstream models, and to replicate a spot trading system on-chain that is closer to the experience of traditional exchanges.

In the previous seed round of financing, Kuru raised $2 million, primarily to establish a technology team, build a minimum viable product (MVP), and prepare for the testing phase. This Series A financing will be used to further expand the team size and to realize the vision of a fully on-chain order book on the target blockchain mainnet.

The core technical architecture of Kuru attempts to build a hybrid system that combines an order book with automated market-making functionalities. The core idea is to introduce a default automated market-making algorithm in the order book of each trading pair on the chain, allowing users to still receive basic quote support in the absence of active liquidity providers. This design does not rely on centralized market makers to maintain market liquidity, nor does it impose a unified constraint on price curves as AMM does, but instead provides the possibility of flexibly switching between the two.

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

Kuru chooses an emerging high-performance blockchain as its deployment platform. This blockchain employs a parallelized architecture and a pipelined scheduling mechanism to enhance processing capability per second and reduce block generation latency. Internal testing data shows that this chain can achieve a processing capability of 10,000 TPS in a controlled environment while maintaining a one-second block generation speed. Leveraging this foundational performance, Kuru builds a fully on-chain and scalable matching system.

The hybrid order book model built 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 behavior closer to traditional trading systems while retaining the openness and composability of decentralized protocols. Ideally, this architecture can not only cover mainstream trading pairs but also serve long-tail assets, thereby providing a unified trading infrastructure for various asset types.

However, there are still a series of uncertain factors at the current stage. First is the risk of technology realization, as there remains a gap between the white paper and the actual operating environment. Multiple dimensions such as on-chain throughput, transaction confirmation, and node synchronization may all become limiting factors. Secondly, there is the actual motivation for user migration. Most on-chain trading users have already developed a habit of using AMM platforms, and it is not easy to persuade them to switch to an order book model. Although Kuru supports a simplified way of participating in liquidity in its mechanism, the actual effect still needs time to observe.