Brine Finance is a decentralized orderbook exchange built on Starkware. They recently raised $16.5m at a valuation of $100m in a round led by Pantera Capital.
This is a write up of my internal research notes, this is not a sponsored post and I do not hold any exposure to Brine at time of writing. Do your own research, not investment advice.
Brine is a cross-chain orderbook DEX offering low trading fees and gas free transactions. They currently have $750k in TVL which has seen modest growth since launch in summer 2023.
![Brine DeX](https://jamesbachini.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-5-1024x505.png)
The founding team is based out of India and there are 24 employees currently listed on Linkedin.
While Brine is advertised as a decentralized exchange it actually uses a hybrid model with wallet data, orderbooks, trades and transactions stored and processed off-chain.
A batch processor sends the transactions to a Cairo prover which then sends it to the Stark verifier which then pushes a state update to user balances on L1.
![Brine Finance Architecture](https://jamesbachini.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-3-1024x662.png)
Users can deposit funds into the exchange on Ethereum mainnet and Polygon networks. The exchange currently lists two markets for Bitcoin and Ethereum against the USDC stablecoin. There is a rest API which users can interact with for programmatic trading.
In my opinion the architecture stretches what could be considered a decentralized exchange and the code isn’t open sourced.
The funding round is an incredible achievement given market conditions and somewhat surprising considering the $100m valuation and lack of traction. I fact checked it and Brine is listed in Pantera’s portfolio, they must see something special in the team and architecture.
![Brine Finance Funding](https://jamesbachini.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/image-4-1024x127.png)
The community is affectionately known as Brinerds and there is currently a trading competition for $2000 USDC live on the ETH/USDC market.
It will be interesting to see how development progresses and if that $16.5m USD can be put to good use to attract users, trading volumes and liquidity.