Maverick, a decentralized crypto derivatives protocol, has raised $8 million in a recently concluded funding round led by Pantera Capital. Other prominent crypto VCs who participated in this strategic funding round include Circle Ventures, Altonomy, Coral Ventures, CMT Digital, GoldenTree Asset Management, Gemini Frontier Fund, Spartan Group, LedgerPrime, Jump Crypto, Taureon and the Tron Foundation.
The funding will be used to launch Maverick’s mainnet (expected in mid-2022) and scale the underlying protocol. Unlike the existing DEXs which are built on the Automated Market Maker (AMM) infrastructure, Maverick leverages a Gaussian Automated Liquidity Placement Model (ALP). The platform also features an open asset-listing function, enabling anyone to launch perpetual crypto trading pairs using an ERC-20 token as collateral.
With the crypto derivatives market growing, Maverick’s decentralized protocol aims to introduce a seamless ecosystem where users can trade perpetual backed by mid-cap tokens. Currently, most of the decentralized exchanges only feature up to 30 trading pairs, leaving out over 100 pairs that are listed on centralized exchanges.
According to Pantera Capital co-CIO Joey Krug, the Maverick permissionless protocol has the capability to meet the growing demand for mid-cap crypto derivatives in the DeFi market,
“Pantera believes Maverick is the protocol to accomplish this. Its innovative market structure is poised to capture a significant chunk of the market by offering low slippage to traders and low-maintenance, capital-efficient staking to LPs.”
Maverick’s ALP model is the crown jewel of this crypto derivatives trading platform; it is an innovative mechanism that automatically concentrates liquidity around the market price. Compared to the popular AMM architecture, the ALP model offers a more capital efficient ecosystem for liquidity providers and less slippage for crypto derivatives traders. In addition, liquidity providers can automatically manage their collateral.
Commenting on the milestone, Maverick’s Co-Founder and CEO Alvin Xu said that the true value of upcoming DeFi platforms is giving users access to the ‘latest and greatest’ crypto assets. The long-term crypto market veteran expressed optimism in Maverick’s cutting edge within the burgeoning DeFi market,
“Being a veteran in the crypto industry, you get to see many trends come and go. One thing that still holds true is a trading platform’s value comes from giving people access to the latest and greatest crypto assets,”
Besides a decentralized perpetual trading ecosystem, Maverick will feature staking pools, rewarding liquidity providers with ecosystem incentives. LPs can choose to stake on existing pools or deploy their own from the platform’s stake screen. The project has already partnered with multiple stakeholders in the DeFi ecosystem to scale its value proposition in the mid-cap crypto perpetual market.
“Perpetual markets still lack the ability to quickly list new assets due to the intensive work required to spin up a sustainable market. With Maverick, we are here to change that paradigm by leveraging ALP (Automated Liquidity Placement). Markets can now be created by the community with way less capital, but still offer a great experience to traders.” added Xu.
