Saddle Finance
Its token holders voted to pause every pool and hand out the treasury
An automated market maker on Ethereum for swapping pegged assets such as stablecoins and tokenised bitcoin with low slippage, spun out of the crypto firm Thesis.
- Recorded announced backing
- Estimated
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2021 | ||
| November 2021 round | 2021 |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunil Srivatsa | — | Founder, investor and engineer who "these days" builds agent tools | Oct 2026 |
Timeline
19 January 2021
Saddle went live with four full-time developers, having recently been spun out of Thesis.
11 November 2021
The company said it planned to expand the team and bring its pools to other chains.
30 April 2022
PANews reported that about $11 million was taken from a Saddle pool through a pricing bug, and that the security firm BlockSec returned $3.8 million of it.
8 August 2023
17 August 2023
Read the full post
SIP-54 has passed and the final transaction from the Saddle multisig has been executed. $ARB and $ETH has been airdropped accordingly, and all Saddle pools have been paused. Users are advised to remove their funds, as pools are no longer active and earning fees. Withdrawals will be available indefinitely. It has been a wild ride, stay safe out there frens 🫡
How it ended
On 8 August 2023 founder Sunil Srivatsa proposed dissolving the Saddle DAO, converting the treasury into Arbitrum tokens and distributing them to holders of its governance token. Reports of the proposal said key contributors planned to stop work by 30 September and cited the exploit of Curve the month before. The proposal passed, and on 17 August Saddle said the final multisig transaction had been executed and every pool paused, with withdrawals left open indefinitely.
Still alive
Open spot
Saddle Finance is gone. Is your DEX still running?
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Sources
11 sources behind this page.
- 1Saddle Raises $7.5M to Reduce Slippage in DeFi Trading · CoinDesk · Nov 2021
- 2Saddle Raises $4.3M for Slippage-Free DeFi Trading · CoinDesk (syndicated on Yahoo Finance) · Jan 2021
- 3Venture-Backed Saddle Finance Proposes Wind-Down, Dissolution · CoinDesk (syndicated on Yahoo Finance) · Aug 2023
- 4Sunil Srivatsa, CEO of Cove Protocol, on People Losing Money to Better-Informed Traders, Approaching Mass Adoption, and Key Trading Practices (Cryptonews Podcast, syndicated on Bitget News) · Cryptonews · Jul 2024
- 5From a strong competitor to liquidation closure, how did Saddle Finance get to this point? · PANews (republished on Odaily) · Aug 2023
- 6Saddle Raises $7.5 Million in Funding Round From Polychain and Electric Capital to Expand Automated Market Maker Capabilities · Saddle (press release via GlobeNewswire) · Nov 2021
- 7About Saddle · Saddle (project documentation, retrieved after the wind-down)
- 8Saddle FAQ · Saddle (project documentation, retrieved after the wind-down)
- 9Posts by @saddlefinance, August 2023 to February 2024 · Saddle on X (account id 1282738025445941251), retrieved via twitterapi.io · Aug 2023
- 10Saddle (@saddlefinance) account record · Saddle on X (account id 1282738025445941251), retrieved via twitterapi.io
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- 11About — Sunil Srivatsa · Sunil Srivatsa (personal site)
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.