ParaFi Fund led the seed investment round in Bastion, a lending protocol operating on Aurora, a second‑layer blockchain platform of the NEAR network. The total amount of fees in Bastion was not disclosed.
The project also attracted investments from Jane Street, Digital Currency Group, Crypto.com, CMS and Manifold Trading. Among the angel investors were NEAR co‑founder Ilya Polosukhin and Terraform Labs’ Director of Business Development Jeffrey Quan.
As Bastion’s blog notes, the project has seen ‘explosive growth’. Within the first 24 hours after the mainnet launch on March 7, the protocol had $200 million in funds locked.
An anonymous Bastion founder told The Block in comments that NEAR has the highest growth potential among all first‑level blockchains:
“As the fastest network with Proof‑of‑Stake consensus and sharding, as well as excellent infrastructure and developer‑friendly tooling, NEAR has all the prerequisites to become the next “center of gravity” for DeFi.”
The publication also noted that Jane Street is one of the world’s largest market makers. For example, in 2020 its futures trading volume amounted to $17 trillion. In January 2022 a company representative in an interview with Bloomberg confirmed that Jane Street is exploring projects in the decentralized finance space.
Earlier in February, Aurora developers were forced to introduce a fee for transactions on their network due to congestion.
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