Maverick Derivatives Protocol Raises $8 Million in Strategic Move Led by Pantera Capital

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by Andy Watson · 4 min read
Maverick Derivatives Protocol Raises $8 Million in Strategic Move Led by Pantera Capital
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Maverick is building its platform to expand the reach and capabilities of decentralized derivative platforms via a more inclusive approach to crypto asset listing.

In a landmark move, Maverick, an innovative, decentralized, and permissionless derivatives protocol, announced an $8 million funding round on Tuesday, led by crypto VC, Pantera Capital. The funding round aims to boost the development of the Automated Liquidity Placement (ALP) technology and an open asset listing model on the derivative platform. Additionally, the funding will be used to build strategic partnerships in the DeFi industry with an aim to boost liquidity provision, offer low slippage, and efficient asset trading on decentralized derivatives platforms, the team’s statement reads.

Pantera Capital led the strategic funding round with other VCs and crypto-based investment groups such as Altonomy, Circle Ventures, CMT Digital, Coral Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund, GoldenTree Asset Management, Jump Crypto, LedgerPrime, Spartan Group, Taureon, and Tron Foundation joining the funding round too. Maverick will form strategic partnerships with each of the investors with a goal to launch its mainnet protocol in the next six months. Additionally, the investment also aims to scale the protocol via rapidly growing its core machine learning and business team.

Over the last few years, the sublime growth of decentralized finance has surpassed the rate of development, meaning most platforms still face grave challenges, preventing mass adoption. One of the major challenges on decentralized derivatives protocols is the lack of mid-cap and long-tail assets, which have been “underserved by existing exchanges”, Pantera Capital co-CIO Joey Krug commented.

“Pantera believes Maverick is the protocol to accomplish this,” he added. “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.”

It is difficult for users to find liquidity to trade mid-cap and long-tail assets on perpetual markets, especially on DEXs. Most of the decentralized exchanges are limited to 30 trading pairs or fewer, compared to the hundreds of pairs available on centralized exchanges. With the derivatives market recording more than half of the trading volumes completed on centralized exchanges, the opportunity for derivatives to grow on DEXs is immense. Maverick aims to boost the number of derivative pairs by enabling open asset listing on its platform.

A New Look at Permissionless Derivatives Trading

As seen with the growth of centralized crypto exchanges in the past few years, the true value of exchange arises “from giving people access to the latest and greatest crypto assets,” Alvin Xu, co-founder, and CEO of Maverick shared in a statement following the funding round.

To this end, Maverick is building its platform to expand the reach and capabilities of decentralized derivative platforms via a more inclusive approach to crypto asset listing. Maverick offers traders an open listing platform for derivative pairs, allowing the listing of any trading pair, and users can stake any ERC-20 supported token as collateral. This boosts the liquidity on the platform while giving liquidity providers (LPs) an opportunity to build new products and create exotic pairs.

The platform also introduces a new pricing model through its Automated Liquidity Placement (ALP) technology. This is an innovative mechanism that automatically positions liquidity more effectively around the market price. The result is greater capital efficiency for liquidity providers and lower slippage for traders. Notwithstanding, automation of the liquidity placement eliminates the need for LPs to actively manage or find someone to manage their liquidity at all times. Speaking on the solutions Maverick’s ALP brings, Xu said:

“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 (Automated Liquidity Placement). Markets can now be created by the community with way less capital, but still offer a great experience to traders.”

Finally, users on Maverick also can open long or short positions on token pairs with up to 10x extra buying power, profiting from the deep liquidity and low slippage enabled by Maverick’s game-changing market mechanism design.

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