Membrane Labs

Membrane Labs is an institutional technology company that builds the operating infrastructure for digital asset credit markets. Founded in 2019, the company provides a modular software platform that connects lenders, borrowers, custodians, and trading venues through a single unified system for managing the full lifecycle of digital asset loans, from origination through settlement. The platform does not hold positions, custody assets, or broker transactions — it acts purely as an infrastructure layer, which the company argues eliminates the conflicts of interest inherent in systems built by market participants.

The Problem Membrane Solves

Institutional digital asset lending has historically relied on fragmented manual workflows: spreadsheets for tracking loan terms, disconnected custody portals for collateral visibility, bilateral phone calls for margin calls, and siloed reconciliation after each settlement. As loan volumes and counterparty counts grew through 2021 and 2022, these gaps became expensive. Collateral mismatches, outdated loan-to-value calculations, delayed margin calls, and incomplete counterparty exposure visibility all increased operational risk at precisely the moment that market conditions demanded real-time decision-making. Membrane was built to replace these workflows with automated, API-connected infrastructure purpose-built for the speed and complexity of crypto credit.

Core Products and Architecture

Membrane's platform is organized into five modular components that together cover the full credit lifecycle.

Loan Management handles automated loan servicing across borrowers and facilities, including real-time LTV tracking, margin call workflows, and audit trails. Institutions can book new loans, monitor existing positions, and manage the full documentation and notification chain from within a single interface rather than across email chains and spreadsheets.

Collateral Management provides 24/7 monitoring and valuation of crypto collateral positions across multiple custodians. Live valuations are tied directly to verified custody balances, giving lending desks accurate collateral views at all times rather than end-of-day snapshots.

Settlement Engine coordinates multi-party, multi-custodian transfers with deterministic routing rules and real-time state tracking. A key feature is a multilateral netting engine that consolidates obligations across bilateral transactions, potentially reducing on-chain transactions by up to 99% for active counterparty networks. The engine eliminates Herstatt risk — the settlement gap risk that arises when one side of a trade settles before the other — through synchronized settlement mechanics.

CustodyLink Network provides unified visibility across major custodians and trading venues. Automated movement logic handles cross-custodian and cross-chain asset transfers, allowing institutions to operate across their preferred custody stack without fragmenting their collateral view.

Risk Analysis delivers real-time exposure, utilization, and liquidity metrics alongside scenario modeling and stress testing. In July 2025, Membrane extended this capability with the launch of an institutional risk engine powered by Bitpulse, adding real-time value-at-risk analysis and portfolio exposure modeling purpose-built for digital asset lenders.

On the pre-trade side, the Credit Discovery Hub enables institutions to discover new credit opportunities through structured request-for-quote workflows, bilateral negotiation tools, and structured data rooms, with direct integration into the loan management system.

The platform integrates into existing institutional technology stacks through a comprehensive API, and legal automation codifies standard master lending agreement terms — including UPA, MLA, and ISDA — into counterparty-specific workflows for automatic application, reducing the legal overhead of each new bilateral relationship.

Patent Protection and Security Posture

Membrane has secured two U.S. patents for its core settlement technology. The first, U.S. Patent No. 11,651,353 B1, was issued in 2023. The second, U.S. Patent No. 12,555,099 B1, titled "Platform for Coordinated Credit-Based and Non-Custodial Digital Asset Settlement," was issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on February 23, 2026. The patent covers coordinated settlement workflows for digital assets across multiple blockchains without centralized custody, including credit-based asset trading, off-chain obligation netting, exposure-triggered settlement, encrypted package exchange, and multi-chain settlement orchestration.

The platform is SOC 2 compliant, reflecting the controls and audit standards expected by institutional counterparties evaluating operational and information security risk.

Team and Background

Membrane Labs was founded by Carson Cook alongside venture studio Hibbard Road Partners. Cook left McKinsey's fintech and financial services practice in 2018 to enter the digital asset space, where he founded Fractal, a crypto-focused market maker, before launching Membrane to address the infrastructure gaps he encountered there. He also co-founded Tokemak, a DeFi liquidity protocol. Cook holds a PhD in Physics and a Masters in Electrical Engineering. The broader Membrane executive team includes veterans of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust, and Bank of America, with backgrounds in electronic trading technology and institutional sales and trading.

Traction and Investors

In October 2023, Membrane Labs raised a $20 million Series A round led by Brevan Howard Digital and Point72 Ventures. Additional investors in 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 spans proprietary trading firms, crypto-native funds, and institutional prime brokers, many of whom are also platform clients.

By mid-2025, the platform had surpassed $10 billion in total crypto loans booked since inception. In 2025 alone, Membrane processed more than $6 billion in new loan volume, with year-to-date bookings exceeding the total for all of 2024. The platform serves more than 20 major institutions, including Electric Capital, Flow Traders, Jump Crypto, Jane Street, BitGo, GSR, Ledn, and QCP Capital.

In February 2025, BitGo announced a strategic partnership with Membrane Labs to power BitGo's Prime Services offering, bringing Membrane's loan management and collateral infrastructure to BitGo's institutional client base. The company has also expanded operations into Asia and the Middle East.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Membrane's platform is chain-agnostic by design. The settlement engine and collateral management system support multi-chain asset movements across blockchains including Solana. Solana is referenced among the large-cap cryptocurrency assets that institutional lenders actively use as loan collateral on the platform, alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum. Several of Membrane's key institutional clients — including Jump Crypto and Electric Capital — are prominent participants in the Solana ecosystem, using Membrane's infrastructure to manage credit operations that span Solana-native assets. As institutional lending against Solana-denominated collateral expands, Membrane's non-custodial settlement and collateral tracking capabilities provide the operational infrastructure to support that activity at scale.