Maverick, a permissionless crypto derivatives trading platform, announced today that it has gathered $8 million in its strategic funding round. Led by Pantera capital, this funding round attracted other cannon-VCs, including the Gemini Frontier Fund, Circle Ventures, Jump Crypto, Coral Ventures, GoldenTree Asset Management, Spartan Group and the Tron Foundation.
According to the press release, the funds will be used in Maverick’s upcoming mainnet launch, scheduled for mid-2022. The project also plans to scale the value proposition of its base protocol by enhancing the core machine learning function and business team. This will set the stage for Maverick’s Gaussian Automated Liquidity Protocol (ALP) debut.
Contrary to the Automated Market Maker (AMM) model which supports most of the pioneer DEXs, Maverick’s innovative ALP architecture features a more capital-efficient ecosystem with less slippage. This is because it is designed to position liquidity around the prevailing market prices.
As it stands, crypto derivatives account for close to 50% of the total trading volumes. However, the DeFi ecosystem lags behind when it comes to derivative instruments. Most of the existing permissionless protocols have listed less than 30 trading pairs, a figure that is yet to match the featured pairs on centralized crypto derivative markets.
Pantera Capital co-CIO Joey Krug believes that Maverick has the potential to serve the growing demand for DeFi derivatives. He commented on the funding round, noting that,
“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 permissionless protocol will revolutionize the decentralized crypto derivatives markets by featuring mid-cap token perpetual, which are hard to find in the current ecosystem. In addition, the platform will offer a more inclusive listing approach, allowing ERC-20 token holders to launch perpetual pairs while using their native tokens as collateral.
Crypto derivatives traders who leverage the Maverick ecosystem will be exposed with up to 10x buying power (margin), alongside staking opportunities for liquidity providers. The platform’s ALP model also eliminates the need for LPs to actively manage their collateral; instead, Maverick’s underlying protocol automatically manages the positions.
While this permissionless derivatives trading platform is still a new kid on the block, Maverick’s Co-Founder and CEO Alvin Xu is optimistic that it will increase in value given the operating niche. Xu, who is also a veteran in the crypto ecosystem, was particularly keen on the growing need to scale decentralized perpetual markets,
“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.”
In addition to the $8 million funding, Maverick protocol has partnered with strategic players in the DeFi ecosystem to bootstrap liquidity. The project also intends to scale its DeFi ecosystem, featuring staking incentives for the network participants.
