Membrane Labs

Membrane Labs builds the operational backbone for institutional digital asset lending and prime brokerage. Founded in 2019 and led by CEO Carson Cook, the company operates on the premise that institutional capital markets require the same workflow automation, risk controls, and settlement precision for crypto that incumbents take for granted in traditional finance—delivered without the vendor taking a proprietary position or acting as a broker.

What Membrane Actually Builds

The platform is structured around two public-facing entry points and a deep infrastructure stack behind them.

The Credit Discovery Hub is where institutional counterparties find each other. It supports structured request-for-quote workflows, bilateral negotiation rooms, and dedicated data rooms, giving lenders and borrowers a governed environment to source and price deals. It feeds directly into the operational layer beneath it.

The Credit Management Platform takes over once a deal is agreed. It handles the full loan lifecycle—booking, collateral management, margining, settlement, and reporting—across multiple custodians simultaneously. The system provides real-time exposure visibility, automated margin enforcement, and settlement coordination via Membrane's CustodyLink™ network, which connects custody accounts across counterparties without forcing anyone to move assets to a central pool. The result is what the company calls "synchronistic subatomic smart settlement": multilateral netting that can reduce on-chain transaction volume by up to 99%, cutting operational friction without sacrificing auditability.

Supporting the platform are four integrated engines:

• Risk Analysis Engine: real-time Value at Risk (VaR) quantification, position stress-testing, scenario simulation, and counterparty exposure modeling. Launched in July 2025 in partnership with risk infrastructure specialist Bitpulse, this module brought institutional-grade risk tooling directly into the loan management workflow.
• Collateral Management Engine: multi-asset threshold configuration and automated enforcement across custodians and venues.
• Treasury Management Module: operational oversight of liquidity positions.
• Unified Payments Hub: transaction reconciliation across the full stack.

The entire infrastructure is API-first and modular, allowing institutional clients to connect Membrane's components to their existing systems rather than replacing them. Membrane integrates with 25-plus blockchain networks, exchanges, and custodians—including Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, BitGo, and Ledn—without requiring counterparties to standardize on a single custody provider.

Team and Backing

Membrane's leadership team draws from senior roles at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust, and Bank of America, with a specific focus on FX electronic trading technology and institutional sales and trading. That pedigree shapes the company's product philosophy: the workflows it automates are ones its founders built or managed in traditional prime brokerage, translated into a crypto-native operating environment.

In late 2024, Membrane raised a $20 million Series A led by Brevan Howard Digital and Point72 Ventures. The round included Jane Street Capital, Flow Traders, Two Sigma Ventures, Electric Capital, Jump Crypto, QCP Capital, GSR Markets, Belvedere Trading, and Framework Ventures—a roster that doubles as the company's client and integration partner network. The capital is funding expansion of the platform's technology suite and geographic footprint.

Growth and Key Partnerships

Membrane's loan management suite surpassed $10 billion in cumulative loan bookings since inception, with year-to-date 2025 volumes running at more than twice the total for all of 2024. The company has processed over $6 billion in new loan volume in 2025 alone and expanded operations into Asia and the Middle East.

Two partnerships define the platform's 2025 trajectory. In February 2025, Membrane announced that its technology would power BitGo Prime, the custody giant's institutional brokerage offering. The integration covers loan management, derivatives management, and payment and treasury functions—replacing the manual processes that previously made institutional prime services operationally intensive at scale.

Later in 2025, Membrane launched a CME Exchange for Physical (EFP) workflow for Bitcoin and Ether, enabling market participants to exchange CME-listed futures positions for equivalent spot positions with Membrane's CustodyLink™ settlement network handling the spot leg. This brought futures-to-spot arbitrage workflows into the platform without requiring external settlement infrastructure.

The company also partnered with Ginco to strengthen Bitcoin treasury infrastructure for institutional clients in Japan, reflecting the Asia-Pacific expansion underway.

Solana's Role

Solana sits within Membrane's multi-chain integration layer as a supported settlement and collateral network. As the institutional lending market matures and demand grows for yield-bearing and liquid staking collateral, Membrane has signaled plans to expand altcoin and staked asset support—positioning Solana-native assets as a natural area of development alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum. The platform's custody-agnostic architecture means Solana custodians and venues can be added without structural changes to the underlying workflow layer.

Positioning

Membrane operates on explicitly neutral rails: it does not take market positions, does not broker deals, and does not custody assets. This posture—lender to none, infrastructure provider to all—addresses a specific gap in the institutional crypto market, where the conflict of interest embedded in vertically integrated prime brokers has historically limited adoption by regulated counterparties. The SOC 2 certification, the TradFi-pedigreed team, and the modular architecture are all oriented toward the same institutional buyer: large lenders, trading firms, and custodians that need operational infrastructure without a counterparty risk attached to it.

With $10 billion in loan bookings, a marquee partnership with BitGo, and a recently launched risk engine, Membrane has established itself as one of the few purpose-built institutional lending infrastructure providers operating at scale in the digital asset market.