Kuru Labs has emerged from stealth with an ambitious mission: to build the world’s first hybrid on-chain central-limit order book (CLOB) with automated market maker (AMM) fallback on Monad, a next-generation Layer-1 blockchain promising 10,000 transactions per second and single-slot finality. Backed by a $11.6 million Series A funding round led by Paradigm, Kuru aims to deliver a fully on-chain liquidity engine designed for traders, builders, and institutional liquidity providers.
This isn’t just another DEX. It’s a foundational play to rewire on-chain trading around speed, composability, and capital efficiency. If you’re a DeFi developer, liquidity architect, or just tired of slippage on existing AMMs, this is your blueprint for what’s coming next—and how you can build on top of it.
Why Monad’s 10K TPS Matters for On‑Chain Trading
Imagine a chess tournament where every move must wait several minutes for the clock to tick. That’s Ethereum’s pace—13 seconds per block with sluggish throughput. Enter Monad: 10,000 transactions per second, one-second blocks, and single-slot finality, meaning every transaction is final within the same block it’s included—no waiting around.
This isn’t just theoretical headroom. Monad’s architecture combines pipeline consensus and optimistic parallel execution, letting multiple transactions process simultaneously and finalize instantly. Behind the scenes lies MonadDB, shifting most state storage to disk rather than requiring expensive RAM. This dramatically lowers hardware barriers and supports decentralization at scale.
For on-chain order books, this changes everything. Central-limit order books rely on rapid, predictable order matching—slow chains choke under high-frequency updates. AMMs, while simpler, suffer from slip and poor price discovery. Monad’s speed fits the bill for high-frequency trading, while its EVM compatibility lets you carry over familiar tools like Solidity, Hardhat, and Foundry with no rework.
Kuru Labs chose Monad not arbitrarily, but because it enables a fully on-chain CLOB integrated with AMM fallback. With fast finality, you can submit, cancel, or modify limit orders in real time—with gas costs so low users can do this frequently without fear of being priced out. For developers, this means shifting from guesswork to precision, matched order managing on-chain instead of outsourcing to centralized services. It represents the leap from experimental proof-of-concepts to real trading-grade infrastructure.
In short, Monad’s 10,000-TPS bandwidth and one-second finality lay the foundation for on-chain experiences that feel instantaneous, precise, and scalable. That’s why Kuru Labs is building their hybrid order book here—and why you as a DeFi developer should care deeply.
Hybrid Order‑Book Meets AMM: How Kuru Innovates
Imagine the heart of a stock exchange brought directly on-chain. That is the bold ambition Kuru Labs pursues: a fully on-chain central-limit order book combined with an automated market maker fallback. This isn’t speculation—it’s engineering turned into a production-grade system.
On traditional AMM-based DEXs, traders frequently grapple with slippage when markets shift or liquidity is thin. Order placement is passive, and price execution is determined by the depth of liquidity the pool holds. Centralized exchanges resolve this with CLOBs—order listings prioritized by time and price to allow precise control and matching. Kuru brings that same control to your EVM contract code.
Kuru’s hybrid model works on two levels. First, it delivers a CLOB that supports limit orders directly on Monad. Users can submit buy or sell orders at any price, with transactions routed instantaneously thanks to Monad’s one-second block times and low fees.
But Kuru doesn’t stop there. For price levels with no resting orders, it activates an AMM fallback—thin liquidity turns thick. This ensures there’s always a pathway to trade, avoiding situations where tightly placed limit orders are caught out by market swings. This model offers buyers the best of both worlds: tight spreads defined by orders, constant access via AMM, and seamless asset discovery, terminal support, and token launch integration.
Behind the pivot lies Monad’s speed. With 10,000 TPS and one-second finality, there’s no lag when orders need modifications or cancellations. Kuru can handle high-frequency trading behaviors that would bake into gas-intensive code on slower networks. The result is a protocol that merges CLOB determinism with AMM accessibility. It’s a liquidity infrastructure built for composability, not compromise.
Series A Funding Explained: Paradigm & Angels
In the summer of 2025, Kuru Labs closed a decisive Series A round, raising $11.6 million led by Paradigm, with additional participation from a star-studded lineup of angel investors including Viktor Bunin, Zagabond, Tristan Yver, Alex Watts, Jordan Hagan, 3nes, Will Price, Shreyas Hariharan, Auri, and Joe Takayama.
Paradigm’s involvement is particularly meaningful; it’s the same powerhouse that spearheaded a $225 million raise for Monad in 2024, demonstrating deep confidence in both the blockchain infrastructure and Kuru’s execution strategy.
Kuru Labs intends to deploy this capital on three key fronts: scaling its engineering and operations team, fast-tracking testnet and mainnet deployment, and building user-facing tools such as an integrated trading terminal and token launchpad.
The presence of seasoned angels from the crypto infrastructure sphere signals a vote of confidence beyond capital. These individuals—many with a history of building or advising high-impact protocols—bring strategic network effects, ecosystems insights, and nuanced understanding of on-chain dynamics.
Financially, $11.6 million provides runway for focused execution. Covering development costs, smart-contract audits, and CLI/GUI tooling, this runway empowers Kuru to iterate quickly, onboard partners, and demonstrate operational KPIs ahead of mainnet launch. In DeFi, early traction—measured in TVL, active volume, and order book depth—is vital for market credibility and capturing leveraged network effects.
Paradigm’s investment is engineered to accelerate Kuru’s vision of bringing hybrid CLOB-AMM liquidity to the broader ecosystem.
Technical Breakdown: Smart Contracts & Gas Efficiency
Kuru Labs’ hybrid CLOB-AMM architecture is a marvel of smart-contract engineering, but it wasn’t designed for bloated code—it was built from the ground up to leverage Monad’s high throughput and EVM compatibility while keeping gas predictable and minimal.
A standout feature is Kuru’s order management mechanism. Instead of traditional on-chain order book inefficiencies, Kuru employs compact, gas-optimized structs and event-driven order states. Developers insert limit orders into a lightweight data structure, referenced by price tick and user account. Cancelling or modifying these orders involves updating a single mapping entry and emitting a structured event, all within one transaction.
Submitting or cancelling limits on a slower chain would be cost-prohibitive, but on Monad’s low-gas environment these operations are highly efficient. Market makers can iteratively tweak prices or cancel entire orders without fearing excessive costs—Kuru isolates gas costs so they scale per order, not per book depth.
This technical model is powered by Monad’s one-second finality and 10,000 TPS performance. Instead of retrying or queueing due to congestion, Kuru can handle bursts of order updates—a crucial capability for high-frequency DeFi strategies.
A second pillar is Kuru’s vault-based passive liquidity mechanism, effectively an embedded AMM for each trading pair. Vaults are smart contracts that accept deposits and execute trades via a bonding curve when order book depth is shallow. The result is two-level liquidity: tight cost in CLOB zones and continuous fallback from the AMM vaults.
To ensure consistent developer experience, Kuru’s team published optimized interfaces compatible with Hardhat and Foundry testing environments. Smart contracts expose predictable gas costs: placing, modifying, and cancelling orders are capped functions. Vault creation, quoting, and swap execution follow unit-tested gas budgets. This predictability enables powerful simulations and backtesting—developers can confidently integrate complex strategies without worrying about spike fees.
DeFi Developer Opportunities on Monad
Monad’s high-performance architecture and Kuru’s hybrid CLOB-AMM model open an expansive playground for developers. You’re not just building; you’re inventing the next standards of on-chain trading infrastructure.
First, imagine launching your token or protocol with seamless order book integration. Instead of settling for limited AMM liquidity, you can tap into programmatic limit order placements—deep, tight spreads and predictable slippage attract more sophisticated traders.
Then there’s vault-based passive liquidity. Kuru’s model allows anyone to fund a vault—a bonded pool supporting AMM fallback—without managing live orders. For developers, this means creating modular factory contracts where users can plug in collateral, configurable bonding curves, and even subscription-based yield strategies.
Smart-contract composability is another key benefit. Kuru smart contracts adhere to EVM standards, with integrations for frameworks like Hardhat and Foundry built-in. That aligns with earlier points: order placements, modifications, and vault initialization all emit structured, gas-optimized events.
Looking ahead, Kuru’s roadmap includes developer incentives—grants, hackathons, liquidity mining events, and a launchpad for tokens debuting on Kuru’s terminal.
Lastly, institutional opportunities abound. With predictable gas profiles and near-zero latency, your protocol can host market-making bots, run limit-order lending, or provide tightly regulated trading strategies, all on a public, trust-minimized chain.
How Kuru Labs Compares to dYdX, Serum, and Uniswap
Kuru Labs enters the DEX space with a bold architecture that stands in contrast to giants like dYdX, Serum, and Uniswap. Each of these predecessors reflects a different trade-off between decentralization, speed, liquidity, and user experience.
Serum on Solana pioneered a fully on-chain CLOB. Its order-book model enables limit orders and price-time priority matching. Yet it lives within Solana’s ecosystem—with a Rust-based programming model and lower composability for EVM developers.
dYdX runs its order-books off chain, with signed orders executed by the protocol. This avoids Ethereum’s gas and latency issues but introduces off-chain sequencers, centralized price feeds, and MEV risks.
Uniswap’s AMM remains the go-to DEX for simplicity and permissionless trading. But even with concentrated liquidity in v3, it lacks tight spread order control or professional trading tools.
Kuru blends the strengths of these models. It brings price-time-priority limit orders on-chain like Serum, but natively in EVM. Unlike dYdX, nothing is signed off-chain—all execution happens transparently. And it complements AMM-style vaults as fallbacks where order books are thin.
Kuru’s Road Ahead: What to Watch
As Kuru Labs transitions from stealth mode to public deployment, its roadmap is built around three mission-critical milestones: community testnet launch, integration with Monad’s mainnet, and liquidity onboarding via a trading terminal and launchpad.
The community testnet is expected to launch in Q3 2025, allowing developers to deploy, test, and simulate trades in a controlled sandbox. This phase will stress-test smart contract execution under real conditions, including market maker behavior, gas profiles, and matching engine performance.
Kuru’s team is concurrently building its trader-facing terminal—a UI designed for pro and retail users. The terminal will feature order books, charting tools, vault participation dashboards, and token launch integrations, all optimized for Monad’s instant finality and low fees.
Another focal point is partnerships. Kuru is in early discussions with algorithmic traders, DAOs, and protocol treasuries to bootstrap liquidity. Onboarding vault deposits, aggregating passive liquidity, and coordinating token launches are key goals for Q4 2025 and into early 2026.
Over the next twelve months, expect a progressive rollout of features—from governance to cross-margin support and composable API endpoints. The team has made clear that decentralization remains the end goal, including plans to eventually decentralize matching logic, liquidity vaults, and governance authority through a native token mechanism.
For builders and liquidity providers, the message is clear: Kuru Labs is not just building another DEX. It’s laying the foundation for the next phase of high-performance, capital-efficient, on-chain finance. Powered by Monad, designed for scale, and optimized for composability, Kuru is inviting a new generation of DeFi infrastructure to rise.
