Variational, a peer-to-peer on-chain derivatives trading protocol, said it has raised $50 million in a round led by global investment fund Dragonfy with participation from companies including Bain Capital Crypto and Coinbase Ventures.
The money will be used to expand the Cayman Islands-based company’s derivatives trading services, it said in a statement released Thursday. This increase comes just as Variational introduces perpetual futures contracts tied to real-world assets (RWA) such as gold, silver, copper, and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil.
“We believe that RWA perpetuals will soon be the largest class of contracts in decentralized finance (DeFi), larger than bitcoin and ether combined,” Lucas V. Schuermann, CEO and co-founder of Variational, told CoinDesk.
Bitcoin the largest cryptocurrency, has a market capitalization of $1.6 trillion. Ether (ETH), the second largest, has $256 billion. Together, they represent almost 68% of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization.
Variational said it has completed more than $200 billion in trading volume since its inception in 2025, and the new funds will allow it to build the infrastructure needed to funnel liquidity directly from traditional markets in the coming months. Its model is specifically designed to pool and route liquidity from traditional and on-chain markets, avoiding the need to create it from scratch on isolated marginal order books, the company said.
“Our Series A guarantees the capital and partners we need to bring [traditional finance] TradFi-level depth to 100 people plus onchain by pooling source liquidity, rather than rebuilding thin order books for each new listing,” Schuermann said.
Dragonfly’s investment comes two months after announcing a $650 million raise, which was one of the largest in the industry at the time, when many blockchain-focused venture capital firms were struggling, said managing partner Haseeb Qureshi. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new investment.
