New York-based Solidus Labs, a crypto risk monitoring startup that also protects from DeFi threats, raises a $45M Series B led by Liberty City Ventures
Anushree Dave / The Block :
Context & Ripple Effects
Solidus Labs' $45M Series B, led by Liberty City Ventures, lands just over a year after its $20M Series A — a fast step-up for a startup selling manipulation detection and compliance tooling to crypto firms.
The round also puts Solidus at the center of a New York cluster building on-chain risk infrastructure: Chaos Labs raised its seed round the following year and a $55M Series A by mid-2024, while security vendor Blockaid pulled in a $50M Series B in early 2025 — investors are repeatedly funding the same thesis from the same city.
First-order effects
- Solidus Labs gets the balance sheet to push beyond exchange-side market surveillance into DeFi threat monitoring, directly against Chaos Labs' automated on-chain risk management offering.
- Liberty City Ventures takes a lead position in a category where every recent round — Solidus, Chaos Labs, Blockaid — has been eight figures, signaling conviction that compliance spend survives crypto downturns.
Second-order effects
- Exchanges, lenders, and DeFi protocols shopping for surveillance now face a competitive vendor market rather than build-or-bust choices, pressuring incumbents like Solidatus-style data-governance tools to add crypto-native monitoring.
- Blockaid's attack-blocking metrics and Chaos Labs' protocol-risk focus force Solidus to differentiate on breadth — covering both centralized-market manipulation and DeFi exploits under one compliance umbrella.
Third-order effects
- If the funding cadence holds, risk monitoring hardens into a distinct infrastructure layer of the crypto industry — the 'picks and shovels' of legitimacy that regulators and institutional entrants treat as a prerequisite, not an option.
The trend: Institutional-grade crypto risk and compliance tooling is becoming a durably funded category, with New York emerging as its densest hub.