Ithaca announces $2.5 million pre-seed round for novel on-chain options protocol

Ithaca Finance, a non-custodial, composable options protocol aimed at building permissionless cross-chain infrastructure enabling optimal risk sharing across time and event horizons, is announcing a pre-seed round for its new on-chain options protocol on January 31, 2024, per the latest information shared with Finbold.

The $2.5 million pre-seed funding round boasts a long list of prominent names and is led by Cumberland and Wintermute Ventures. Additionally, it features angel investors Andrew Keys of DARMA Capital, Stan Miroshnik of TenSquared Capital, and Georgios Vlachos of Axelar, as well as Room40 Ventures and Ghaf Capital Partners.

Commenting on the round, Cumberland highlighted the expertise of Ithaca’s team, while Wintermute highlighted its high hopes for the company’s protocol:

Ithaca’s options platform breaks down complex financial contracts into composable elements, making it easier to handle risk and resulting in a transparent trading experience for users, and it achieves this with a liquidity-enhancing matching algorithm. We believe the team’s vision is a truly innovative approach to building composable options markets for any asset, and we’re excited to be part of this journey.

What exactly is Ithaca doing?

The pre-seed funding round announced on January 31 supports Ithaca’s goal of building a non-custodial risk primitive aimed at helping billions in options volume migrate on-chain and enable an efficient outlet for trillions in latent options and structured payoff demand.

According to the information shared with Finbold, on-chain options volumes are underperforming compared with spot and perpetuals, and cryptocurrency options are undershooting when compared to all other asset classes.

With its protocol, Ithaca hopes to boost the underperforming sector while solving issues such as fragmentation across blockchains and low liquidity amidst an absence of innovation in risk-sharing mechanics.

To this end, the company is designing a permissionless purpose-built infrastructure to aggregate cross-chain liquidity and enable optimal risk sharing. The protocol is powered by an algorithmic market clearing framework that is auction-based and MEV-resistant.

Dimitrios Kavvathas, the leader of the Ithaca team and former Partner at Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), also took the time to express gratitude to the investors in the pre-seed round by stating:

We are truly grateful for our investors’ support and are looking forward to revolutionizing the digital asset options trading landscape with their guidance and partnership.

Users can already test the protocol on the testnet and, in doing so, participate in the ‘Ithaca Points Program.’