San Francisco, Feb. 16, 2022 — Maverick Protocol, an innovative permissionless derivatives protocol, has announced $8 million in funding from leading investors to bring its groundbreaking automated liquidity-placement (ALP) technology and open asset-listing model to market. The protocol has also secured strategic partnerships with liquidity providers (LP) to support its mission to revolutionize decentralized finance (DeFi) derivatives.
Maverick’s strategic fundraising round is being led by Pantera Capital, including other investors such as Altonomy, Circle Ventures, CMT Digital, Coral Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund, GoldenTree Asset Management, Jump Crypto, LedgerPrime, Spartan Group, Taureon and Tron Foundation.
The funding will help Maverick launch its mainnet product in mid-2022 and scale its protocol by rapidly growing its core machine-learning and business team.
Maverick’s mission is to expand the reach of decentralized derivatives through a more inclusive approach to crypto asset listing. Currently, it is difficult for users to trade mid-cap tokens on perpetual markets, even on nominally permissionless trading protocols: Derivatives decentralized exchanges (DEX) are limited to 30 trading pairs or fewer, compared to the hundreds of pairs available on centralized 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. Maverick is targeting this greenfield by utilizing a protocol to open listings to any trading pair while allowing users to use any ERC-20 protocol token as collateral. Tapping into this underutilized liquidity can bring new market opportunities to liquidity providers and traders globally.
Maverick also promises industry-leading pricing through its proprietary Gaussian (ALP) virtual AMM, an innovative mechanism that automatically positions liquidity more effectively based on the market price. The result is greater capital efficiency for liquidity providers and lower slippage for traders. At the same time, this automation effectively eliminates the need for liquidity providers to manage their collateral or pay others to do it for them. In turn, the intrinsically passive nature of staking via Maverick makes it the ideal composable platform for building further exciting DeFi applications in the future.
“DeFi needs someone to answer the demand for derivatives built on the mid-cap and long-tail assets that are underserved by existing exchanges,” said Joey Krug, co-chief information officer of Pantera Capital. “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.”
“Being a veteran in the crypto industry, you get to see many trends come and go. One thing that still holds true is that a trading platform’s value comes from giving people access to the latest and greatest crypto assets,” said Alvin Xu, co-founder of Maverick. “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.”
About Maverick
Maverick is a permissionless derivatives protocol with an innovative liquidity bootstrapping mechanism— the ALP virtual AMM — that positions liquidity more effectively based on the market price. This results in benefits for both LPs and traders by improving capital efficiency as well as enabling low slippage. This unique mechanism allows Maverick to be the first protocol that can quickly expand to support many exotic pairs that are not currently available in centralized or decentralized perpetual markets.
LPs can use Maverick to find enhanced yield-farming opportunities for any ERC-20 protocol token they might hold, and our Gaussian ALP mechanism removes the need for them to constantly manage their liquidity. Traders can open long or short positions on token pairs with up to ten times the buying power, profiting from the deep liquidity and low slippage enabled by Maverick’s game-changing market mechanism design.
Contact name
Alvin Xu
info@mav.xyz