Maverick Protocol raises $8M in funding round led by Pantera Capital

• Pantera Capital led the funding round contributed to by among other, Gemini Frontier Fund and Circle Ventures.

• Maverick seeks to use its strategic partnerships with several liquidity providers to revolutionize the decentralised finance (DeFi) derivatives market.  

Maverick Protocol, an innovative permissionless derivatives platform, has announced an $8 million funding round from leading investors in the crypto ecosystem, led by Pantera Capital.

According to the platform, the funds will go towards a product launch as well as team expansion in the next few months.

Circle Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund and Jump Crypto contributed to the funding round, with other major participants being Altonomy, CMT Digital, GoldenTree Asset Management, and Tron Foundation.

New technology for perpetual derivatives markets

Dubbed ALP (Automated Liquidity Placement), Maverick’s technology is designed to allow traders access to decentralised derivatives through an open listing model. The tech is set to change perpetual markets, according to Maverick co-founder  Alvin Xu, with users able to easily trade mid-cap tokens on decentralised derivatives exchanges.

“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 […] markets can now be created by the community with way less capital, but still offer a great experience to traders,” Maverick’s co-founder, Alvin Xu said.

Maverick also looks to use the funds to scale the ALP via a rapid expansion of its core machine learning protocol. The platform will also seek to grow its team as it moves towards exploiting a growing market for derivatives.

The ALP protocol allows for open listing of derivative trading pairs, easing access to hundreds of pairs as opposed to the limit of 30 pairs allowed for DEXs.

With its innovation, crypto users will be able to leverage any trading pair, with any tokens in ERC20 token standard allowed as collateral, Maverick noted in its announcement.

Revolutionising the crypto DEX derivatives market

The innovation could revolutionise the decentralise finance (DeFi) derivatives market, said Pantera Capital co-CIO Joey Krug.

“DeFi needs someone to answer the demand for derivatives built on the mid-cap and long-tail assets that are underserved by existing exchanges,”

Users will benefit from low slippage, with gains made from capital-efficient staking to liquidity providers (LPs), he added.

Derivatives volume makes up more than 50% of the daily trading volume in the digital asset market. In this case, the massive growth seen in the sector since 2021 offers a great opportunity for derivatives DEXs.

Maverick plans to launch its innovative technology in mid-2022.