Econia Labs, a startup developing decentralized order books for the Aptos blockchain, announced today that it raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Dragonfly.

Other investors joining the round included, among others, Lightspeed Faction, Wintermute Ventures, Hudson River Trading, Flow Traders, Aptos Labs.

Econia Labs develops an underlying toolset of protocols that permit settlement and trading for decentralized finance applications and projects. Decentralized finance, also known as DeFi, is a financial technology that is based on secured distributed blockchain ledgers and uses cryptocurrency as the medium of exchange for economic transactions to provide financial services similar to banks and brokerages such as currency and securities exchange, interest generation, lending and other services.

Econia’s protocol provides on-chain order books for the Aptos blockchain, which are fundamental for decentralized exchanges and marketplaces. Using Econia’s matching engine, orders can be settled during the transaction in which they are placed meaning they occur immediately. These order books open the opportunity for numerous applications including spot trading to leveraged futures.

“We recognize significant utility in a blockchain-based order book that empowers integrating protocols to efficiently utilize capital on-chain,” said Alex, the chief executive of Econia Labs. (The CEO apparently goes only by a single name.) “Our goal is to support an extensive trading ecosystem that leverages the Move programming language and Aptos’ Block-STM execution engine.”

The protocol and its tools were built in close collaboration with the Aptos Labs team.

Aptos Labs is a blockchain startup and brainchild of former employees of Meta Platforms Inc. who worked on the company’s ill-fated payment system Diem. The team repurposed the technology to develop a blockchain designed to rival blockchain ecosystems such as Ethereum, which is the second-largest blockchain by market cap.

Aptos developed Move, an open-source smart contract programming language designed with improved security to speed up transaction time and cut costs, and Block-STM, which is a “parallel execution engine” the company claims is capable of executing over 160,000 transactions per second.

The blockchain launched its mainnet in October after raising over $350 million in funds through two venture capital rounds, but the company has seen some criticism over its performance and the number of projects launched. As a result, the addition of Econia Labs project will be a boon to its ecosystem by adding additional opportunities for the developers of decentralized marketplaces.

As of now, Econia is feature-complete at the virtual machine level and decentralized application builders can start connecting smart contracts to the machine engine. Soon DeFi developers will have access to client libraries, software development kits and indexers directly from the core protocol.

The company said the new funds would be used to expand its team and focus on community initiatives such as hackathons, grants for new projects and bringing developers into the Econia and Aptos ecosystems.

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