Hudson River, Amber Crypto Quant Vets Want to Take on Solana

Yahoo

20-02-2025

(Bloomberg) -- A pair of veterans from the quantitative trading world have launched a blockchain startup that wants to help other crypto projects seeking to replicate the success of the Solana network.
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Anit Chakraborty, who was most recently a software engineer at proprietary trading firm Hudson River Trading for over 15 years, has joined Annabelle Huang, former managing partner at crypto market maker Amber Group to form Altius Labs. They've raised $11 million in a pre-seed funding round co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and digital-asset investment firm Pantera through an instrument know as a SAFE, or a simple agreement for future equity, as well as token warrants, Chakraborty and Huang said in an interview.
Altius Labs plans to introduce a new blockchain layer that will significantly improve performance of existing blockchains, the co-founders said.
'I think at least in the crypto world now there's some recognition that this is a space that needs a little bit more work with distributed system expertise to scale up to the next level of performance,' said Chakraborty, who added that his expertise in high-frequency trading made him familiar with the distributed systems in the digital-asset sector.
Blockchain-based projects like decentralized exchanges and peer-to-peer lenders have taken off on the Ethereum blockchain. There are currently hundreds of blockchains for developers to choose from to build projects. But recently, much of the high-profile activity have been concentrated on Solana, a high-performance blockchain that requires relatively low fees for transactions. That has made it a favorite of issuers of memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency without any real utility.
Altius Labs aims to separate the execution of transactions from other functions on an existing blockchain, resulting in improvements of the speed and the ability to communicate with other networks.
Venture investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars in the blockchain infrastructure sector over the past year. Blockchain startup Monad, which was founded by former employees at Jump Trading, raised $225 million last year. Berachain, another new blockchain that officially went live earlier this month, raised $100 million last year. Huang said Altius Labs technology will be compatible across different blockchain computing environments, meaning that it can be connected to Solana and other blockchains too through the execution layers.
'If we really see mass adoption solely on Solana, it's also going to face congestion,' she said.
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