Vega, a Gibraltar-based capital-efficient, decentralized derivatives trading protocol that bridges traditional finance and DeFi, raised $5m in funding.
The round was led by Arrington Capital and Cumberland DRW, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Signum Capital, CMT Digital, CMS Holdings, Three Commas, GSR, SevenX Ventures, ZeePrime Capital, The DeFi Alliance, Aave CEO & Founder Stani Kulechov, Enzyme Finance Founder Mona El Isa, Co-Founder and CEO of Terraform Labs (TFL) Do Kwon, and CEO and Co-Founder of Kyber Network Loi Luu, Hashed, Eden Block, Greenfield One, KR1, gumi Cryptos Capital, and Monday Capital.
Led by Barney Mannerings, Founder, Vega aims to democratize markets by enabling anyone to create and launch a derivatives market while eliminating centralized gatekeepers and decentralizing governance, allowing for instant settlement (< 1 sec), removing conflict of interest from markets, reducing fees, and enabling the throughput (up to 10K TPS) necessary for high-volume derivatives trading.
The protocol brings together over two years of engineering efforts and original academic research into on-chain derivatives. In addition to building a customized blockchain focused on performant and scalable trading, Vega presents a suite of innovations in areas including on- chain anti-frontrunning, liquidity incentives, active and passive market making, the CLOB and AMM dichotomy, as well as on-chain circuit breakers and decentralized risk management.
The company launched its TestNet in Q2 2020 and has had a number of iterations since. Concurrently, the team launched a Markets and Liquidity Programme in June 2020 with eight founding members joining as the protocol’s earliest institutional adopters. The upcoming Flamenco Tavern release will launch liquidity mining onto the TestNet, characterized by a unique blend between active and passive liquidity provision.
Vega is currently advancing towards its Mainnet release with plans for enabling self-custodied cross-chain collateral, and building a trustless bridge into the Ethereum ecosystem. Future deployments will widen Vega’s scope into other major blockchains including Bitcoin, Polkadot and Cosmos, driving toward Vega’s overarching mission to democratize derivatives infrastructure.
FinSMEs
25/03/2021