In brief
- Framework Labs has received an $8 million seed investment round led by investment firm Station 13.
- Framework Labs is heavily involved in staking for Synthetix and providing liquidity for Uniswap.
- The cash infusion will go toward hiring engineers and researchers for the new DeFi-focused Frameworks Labs.
We do the research, you get the alpha!
Framework Ventures announced today an $8 million dollar seed investment led by investment firm Station 13, designed to help grow the new Framework Labs team of researchers, traders, and engineers for the DeFi market.
With the funding, Framework has hired the former CTO and co-founder of decentralized exchange IDEX and former Wavemaker Partners principal Roy Learner. The investment comes as DeFi keeps heating up, locking more billions of user value in the rapidly growing ecosystem.
“We’re exceptionally proud to unveil Framework Labs, the manifestation of Framework Ventures’ Network Capital thesis: that alpha will be generated as much by hard work during network maturation as it is by picking winners early,” Framework Ventures co-founder Michael Anderson said.
Framework Ventures was founded in 2019. It’s a large investor in Chainlink and provides off-chain data to smart contracts as part of Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network.
Framework Labs, though it’s only been officially announced today, claims to already be the largest stakeholder in Synthetix, which is governed by token holders via a set of DAOs. Moreover, it’s purportedly a major provider of liquidity on the Uniswap decentralized exchange platform.
“DeFi is coming into its own and beginning to achieve product-market fit at scale, yet traditional investors are asleep at the wheel when it comes to the category,” Framework Labs co-founder Vance Spencer said in a release explaining the move. “It isn’t enough to buy and hold tokens and provide ‘thought leadership’—DeFi is not a spectator sport.”
In addition to direct investment in DeFi protocol tokens and infrastructure already undertaken by Framework Ventures, Framework Labs will continue to contribute to the DeFi ecosystem by helping craft and vote on governance proposals. It will also mentor nascent crypto startups and provide full-stack engineering support to build consumer-facing applications that interact with DeFi under the hood.