Decentralized lending protocol Echelon has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round led by Amber Group, with backing from several crypto venture capital firms.

The platform plans to use the funding to promote the decentralized finance ecosystem, according to details in a press release on Aug. 27.  

Echelon will utilize the seed funding to expand its product offerings, grow its team, and implement a treasury, cross-chain vaults, and real-world asset-backed strategies.

Eyeing DeFi across Move-based ecosystem

Echelon offers a money market platform for borrowing and lending of crypto assets through non-custodial pools. This enables its customers to earn interest as well as leverage their assets to increase their buying power.

 Users on the decentralized lending platform can achieve these further earning opportunities via staking and real-world assets.

Echelon wants to bring its products such across DeFi and RWA to Aptos (APT) and other proof-of-stake blockchains built with the Move programming language. The Rust-based language has increasingly become popular in the smart contracts space since its use in Meta’s Diem project.

Sui (SUI) is another project that uses the Move programming language.

Echelon will also target Movement, a network of modular Move-based blockchains on which developers can build interoperable dApps that bridge Move-based platforms and Ethereum (ETH) virtual machine ecosystems. Movement is Ethereum’s first Move-EVM layer-2 network.

Movement Labs raised $3.4 million in its pre-seed funding round, with funds going into a softwared development kit aimed at the web3 interoperabilty ecosystem.

Apart from Amber Group, Echelon’s seed round attracted participation from several strategic partners, including Laser Digital, Selini Capital, Interop Ventures, Saison Capital, and Re7.