Decentralized derivatives protocol, Maverick successfully completes an $8 million funding round

Decentralized and permissionless derivatives platform, Maverick has successfully completed an $8 million funding round from leading investors and VCs in the crypto and asset management industry. The funding aims to bring the platform’s ‘groundbreaking’ Automated Liquidity Placement (ALP) technology and open asset listing models to market, a statement from the team reads. Notwithstanding, the latest funding will also be used to build strategic partnerships that will help users on the platform experience the next revolution of decentralized finance, DeFi. 

Maverick announced on Tuesday that the funding round was led by Pantera Capital, with other investors and VCs joining the round later. Some of the investors include Altonomy, Circle Ventures, CMT Digital, Coral Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund, GoldenTree Asset Management, Jump Crypto, LedgerPrime, Spartan Group, Taureon, and Tron Foundation. The $8 million backing aims to enable Maverick to launch and scale its ALP technology while rapidly growing its core machine learning and business team.

Pantera Capital co-CIO Joey Krug stated Maverick aims to provide a solution to the growing demand for DeFi solutions by including mid-cap and long-tail derivative assets that are currently unavailable on most centralized and decentralized exchanges. It is increasingly difficult for traders to swap mid-cap-tokens and long-tail assets on perpetual markets, especially on DEXs. For instance, most derivative DEXs are limited to a few assets (of about 30 pairs or fewer), which is miniscule compared to the thousands of pairs available on centralized derivatives exchanges. Since derivatives account for more than 50% of daily crypto trading volume, the opportunity for a derivatives DEX that allows open listing is enormous. 

“Pantera believes Maverick is the protocol to accomplish this [providing answers to demand for derivatives built on the mid-cap and long-tail assets],” Krug said. “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.”

Launched as a permissionless derivatives protocol, Maverick currently offers more developments on its platform including the “Automated Liquidity Placement vAMM”. This is an innovative bootstrapping mechanism that positions liquidity more effectively around the market price. The innovation benefits both liquidity providers (LPs) and traders by improving capital efficiency as well as enabling low slippage. 

“Perpetual markets still lack the ability to quickly list new assets due to the intensive work required to spin up a sustainable market,” said Maverick’s co-founder and CEO, Alvin Xu. “With Maverick, we are here to change that paradigm by leveraging ALP (Automated Liquidity Placement). Markets can now be created by the community with way less capital, but still offer a great experience to traders.”

As the first of its kind to launch the unique mechanism, Maverick allows users to quickly expand the assets offered on the platform, allowing the trading of many exotic pairs that are not currently available on CEXs and DEXs. 

“Being a veteran in the crypto industry, you get to see many trends come and go,” added Xu. “One thing that still holds true is a trading platform’s value comes from giving people access to the latest and greatest crypto assets.” 

Notwithstanding, automating the liquidity placement also effectively eliminates the need for LPs to manage their collateral or designate management of their collateral. This allows users and LPs on Maverick to passively manage their liquidity through staking, opening a new world to build further innovative DeFi applications on the platform. 

In the future Maverick targets to provide solutions to the failing decentralized derivative exchange market. This will entail utilizing a protocol open to listings to any trading crypto pair while allowing users to use any ERC20 token as collateral. This will boost the liquidity locked on the platform, bringing in new market opportunities to LPs and traders in the decentralized space.