Maverick announces $8M in Pantera-led funding round

Novel permissionless derivatives protocol Maverick announced it had attracted $8 million in funding from leading investors to launch its groundbreaking ALP (Automated Liquidity Placement) technology and open asset-listing model, Invezz learned from a press release.

Maverick also secured strategic partnerships with liquidity providers to revolutionize DeFi derivatives. The funding round was led by Pantera Capital with the participation of Circle Ventures, Altonomy, CMT Digital, Gemini Frontier Fund, Coral Ventures, GoldenTree Asset Management, Tron Foundation, LedgerPrime, Spartan Group, and Taureon.

Funding to help protocol launch mainnet product

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The funding will help Maverick launch its mainnet product in the middle of this year. It will also enable it to scale its protocol by rapidly growing its core machine learning and business team.

More inclusive crypto asset listing

It’s currently difficult for users to trade mid-cap tokens on perpetual markets, even on nominally permissionless trading protocols. Decentralized derivatives exchanges have 30 trading pairs at most. CEXs, on the other hand, have hundreds.

Derivatives make up over half of daily crypto trading volume, so there are many possibilities for a derivatives DEX that allows open listing. The platform is using a protocol to open any trading pair listing. At the same time, any ERC20 token can be used as collateral.

Industry-leading pricing

Maverick’s proprietary Gaussian ALP vAMM, an innovative mechanism that automatically positions liquidity more effectively around the market price, promises industry-leading pricing. The automation effectively does away with the need for liquidity providers to manage their collateral or pay others to do it.

Maverick cofounder Alvin Xu commented:  

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. 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. Markets can now be created by the community with way less capital, but still offer a great experience to traders.

Pantera Capital co-CIO Joey Krug added:

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.