Maverick Protocol Announces $8 Million Funding Backed by Pantera Capital and Other Leading VCs

Maverick, a DeFi-focused derivatives platform, has completed an $8 million funding round according to a press release on February 15th. This strategic round was led by Pantera Capital, alongside other heavyweight VCs in the crypto industry; some of the investors who participated include Jump Crypto, Circle, Spartan Group, Gemini Frontier Fund, GoldenTree Asset Management, CMT Digital, and the Tron Foundation.

The newly injected capital will be directed towards the launch of Maverick’s mainnet, expected to debut in mid-2022. In addition, the project intends to scale the capabilities of its base protocol by improving the core machine learning function and expanding the business team. This foundation will set the ground for the launch of Maverick’s Gaussian Automated Liquidity Protocol (ALP).

While the Automated Market Model (AMM) has been the primary approach by most DEXs, it suffers some setbacks in capital efficiency and price slippage. Maverick’s innovative ALP model addresses these issues by positioning liquidity around real-time market prices at any moment. Furthermore, this crypto derivatives trading platform features an open asset-listing ecosystem where participants can leverage ERC-20 tokens as collateral.

Given the potential in the crypto derivatives market, Maverick’s goal is to integrate mid-cap perpetual pairs with the DeFi niche. The protocol intends to list more perpetual trading pairs than the ones featured on pioneer DeFi derivatives platforms. As of writing, most DEXs have only listed up to 30 perpetual trading pairs, barely meeting the growing demand for decentralized crypto derivative instruments.

Pantera Capital co-CIO Joey Krug is optimistic that the Maverick ecosystem will bridge the existing gap in the DeFi derivatives market, “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.”

The Maverick protocol will also offer up to 10x leverage on the listed perpetual trading pairs. Additionally, the platform is set to launch staking opportunities for liquidity providers who allocate capital towards facilitating Maverick’s permissionless pools. Maverick’s ALP model will enable LPs to automatically manage their collateral, eliminating the need to actively watch one’s position or pay others to do it.

Though a nascent player in the DeFi derivatives market, the project’s Co-Founder and CEO Alvin Xu believes that Maverick’s value proposition will earn the protocol a place in this burgeoning space. According to Xu, there is significant room for expansion in the decentralized crypto derivatives trading market:

“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.”

Looking into the future, this permissionless derivatives trading protocol plans to scale its underlying functionalities to cater to the growing needs of LPs and traders in the DeFi market. Maverick has also partnered with other decentralized projects to realize this vision.