Variational, an Arbitrum-based derivatives startup, has received $50 million in a Series A round led by Dragonfly Capital.
The Block recently reported that Bain Capital Crypto and Coinbase Ventures also participated in the investment.
Variational, co-founded by Lucas Schuermann and Edward Yu, is focused on bringing traditional finance dealer and exchange liquidity to on-chain trading. It also plans to offer a range of derivatives, including physical commodities.
Variational plans to list more than 100 traditional finance products on-chain this summer. Ahead of that, it has started a first-phase test using infrastructure tied to gold, silver, copper and crude oil.
Variational said it can aggregate liquidity from existing exchanges to create a deeper market than order book-based on-chain platforms such as Hyperliquid.
The Variational team said it would bypass the bottleneck of having to build an order book from scratch by routing directly to traditional finance sources, and immediately connect DeFi to large-scale off-chain liquidity.
Variational's strategy is to position itself as a retail-friendly platform like Robinhood that offers commission-free trading through its Omni app, which is under development.
Chi-gyu Hwang
delight@d-today.co.kr