Peer-to-peer trading startup Variational raises $50 million for real-world perps in funding round led by Dragonfly
The company is initially offering perpetual futures on real-world assets including oil, silver, copper and gold.
What to know:
- Variational, an onchain derivatives trading protocol, said it raised $50 million in a round led by Dragonfly with participation from Bain Capital Crypto and Coinbase Ventures.
- The company plans to use the funding to expand its derivatives trading services, including its range of perpetual futures tied to real-world assets such as gold, silver, copper and WTI crude oil.
- Variational, which says it has processed more than $200 billion in trading volume since 2025, aims to aggregate liquidity from traditional and onchain markets to offer over 100 onchain perpetual contracts with so-called TradFi-grade depth.
“We believe RWA perpetuals will soon be the biggest contract class in decentralized finance (DeFi), bigger than bitcoin and ether combined,” Lucas V. Schuermann, CEO and co-founder at Variational, told CoinDesk.
Bitcoin , the largest cryptocurrency, has a market capitalization of $1.6 trillion. Ether (ETH), the second-biggest, has $256 billion. Combined, they account for almost 68% of the total cryptocurrency market cap.
Variational said it has carried more than $200 billion in trading volume since its inception in 2025, and the new funds will enable it to build the infrastructure needed to route liquidity directly from traditional markets within the coming months. Its model is uniquely designed to aggregate and route liquidity from traditional and onchain markets, avoiding the need to build it from scratch on isolated marginal order books, the company said.
