Variational Secures $10.3 Million in Seed Funding to Expand Peer-to-Peer Trading Protocol, Led by Bain Capital Crypto and Peak XV Partners (FKA Sequoia India)

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George Town, Cayman Islands, October 23rd, 2024, Chainwire

Variational powers Omni, a platform that allows users to trade perpetual futures on memecoins, points, baskets, pre-market tokens, and more.

Variational, a protocol enabling leveraged peer-to-peer trading for customizable crypto derivatives, announced today it has secured $10.3 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and Peak XV Partners (FKA Sequoia India) with support from Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, North Island Ventures, HackVC, and many other VCs, angel investors, and industry leaders.

Variational automates the entire trading and clearing process through the use of on-chain settlement pools, a low-latency pricing oracle, and robust liquidation & funding rate engines. This infrastructure allows Variational to offer safe peer-to-peer trading of perpetuals, futures, options, and more.

Omni, Variational’s first application, is a retail-focused platform designed for seamless trading of permissionless perps. Omni enables traders to take leveraged long or short positions on any time series, with a particular focus on newly launched tokens, baskets, yield/volatility perps, and other novel products. Omni maximizes liquidity on all markets through the dedicated Omni Liquidity Provider (OLP), which aggregates liquidity and hedges through DEXs, CEXs, and OTC markets. The Omni Liquidity Provider will be open to community deposits, allowing any Omni user to potentialy earn based on OLP’s performance. Omni is currently live in testnet on Arbitrum Sepolia, and will go live on Arbitrum One upon its mainnet launch.

“Our vision is for Variational to underpin applications for both retail and institutional derivatives traders,” said Lucas V. Schuermann, CEO of Variational. “While our current focus is to revolutionize long-tail perps trading with Omni, we have ambitions for Variational Protocol to streamline OTC trading flows, make hedging easier for institutions, and more.”

Founded in 2021, Variational is led by co-founders Lucas V. Schuermann and Edward Yu. Both founders have extensive experience in crypto derivatives, having previously founded and sold a quantitative hedge fund and ran the engineering team of one of crypto’s largest market makers. The protocol is maintained by a veteran engineering team active in algorithmic crypto trading since 2016 with prior experience at Google, Meta, Goldman Sachs, Etsy, Twilio, and more.

“Crypto derivatives need the reliability, simplicity, and adaptability that the Variational protocol provides,” said Tom Schmidt, Partner at Dragonfly Capital. “Omni in particular goes beyond just efficient trading — it unlocks access to new derivatives for all market participants. We’re proud to support them in bringing new and unique markets to a broader audience.”

“With so many industry leaders participating in this round, we’re more confident than ever about the excitement for Variational,” Lucas elaborated. “It’s been humbling to see the response from both institutions and retail about the problems we’re working to solve.”

For more information and to sign up for early access to Omni’s mainnet, users can visit variational.io.

About Variational

Variational is a peer-to-peer trading protocol for perpetuals and generalized derivatives. Variational automates the process of trading and clearing end-to-end for safe peer-to-peer trading of options, futures, perpetuals, and more.

Variational Protocol will initially support two apps: Omni, a retail-focused platform for permissionless perps trading, and Pro, a platform catering to advanced and institutional traders of nonlinear derivatives. In the future, Variational Protocol’s open design will facilitate the growth of a vibrant ecosystem, with additional applications focusing on areas such as potential yield generation, lending, and more.

For more information, users can follow Variational’s Twitter.