Maverick Protocol raises $8 million in funding
Maverick is being funded by a veritable who’s who of the crypto industry’s biggest VC names, including Pantera Capital, which established the first-ever crypto fund in the U.S. back in 2013, which led the round. Other participants include Altonomy, Circle Ventures, CMT Digital, Coral Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund, GoldenTree Asset Management, Jump Crypto, LedgerPrime, Spartan Group, Taureon, and Tron Foundation.
Maverick is a permissionless derivatives protocol previously operating in stealth mode, which says it’s aiming to revolutionize derivatives trading in DeFi. No serious derivatives trader can do so outside of centralized exchanges such as Binance because the options don’t exist. Whereas most centralized exchanges can offer over 100 derivative trading pairs, most DEXs provide less than 20, focusing exclusively on top tier coins. So it’s impossible to trade mid-cap tokens on perpetual markets.
It means DeFi is missing a big opportunity, Maverick says, as more than 50% of the daily trading volume in crypto comes from the derivatives markets.
Joey Krug, Co-CIO of Pantera Capital, said:
DeFi needs someone to answer the demand for derivatives built on the mid-cap and long-tail assets that are underserved by existing exchanges. 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 will expand derivatives trading to DEXs with the aid of its Gaussian Automated Liquidity Placement vAMM, which is an entirely new mechanism that automates liquidity placement in markets more effectively than other methods. Not only does this mean more capital efficiency for liquidity providers, removing the need to manage their collateral, it also translates to less slippage for traders. **
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The ALP protocol is based around the idea of capital-efficient, passive staking with high yield for LPs, Maverick says. It will enable open-asset listing, with traders able to stake any ERC20 token as collateral. **
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Alxin Xu, the co-founder and CEO of Maverick, in an interview with Hackernoon, said:
ALP makes it possible for new derivatives markets to be created entirely by the trading community. Up until now, he said perpetual markets have been unable to list most crypto assets due to the intense work need to create sustainable markets. 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.
Maverick said the funding comes ahead of the planned launch of its mainnet later this year and that it will now build out its core business and machine learning teams to scale its protocol. It believes there’s a much bigger opportunity than just decentralized derivatives trading, saying its passive staking mechanism could potentially serve as the ideal composable model for dozens of other DeFi use cases.
Crypto record-breaking month with nearly $5 billion in investments
In January, venture capital funds continued to pour into the crypto business. The roughly $5 billion in additional funds set a new monthly high.
Almost 200 crypto businesses received funding in January despite the overall crypto market slump.
Bitcoin’s price has fallen from approximately $60,000 in early December to roughly $40,000 now. Despite this, fundraising rounds have continued to grow in size, particularly for later-stage startups. There were 15 mega-rounds of at least $100 million, with Fireblocks raising the most money at $550 million. Pantera Capital’s latest fund has garnered over $1 billion in total commitments. The fund’s initial target of $600 million has almost doubled to over $1 billion.
The crypto trading, custody, and financial services sectors garnered the highest money overall. The NFT and gaming verticals also received a lot of money, although they have slowed down recently. VCs were also interested in the crypto infrastructure area.
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**Image credits: Dylan Tan and Hans Eiskonen.