Futureswap has raised $12 million in venture funding from Ribbit Capital, Framework and Placeholder to launch an updated version of its Ethereum-based exchange.
The protocol, which taps into v3 of leading automated market maker (AMM) Uniswap, enables leverage of up to 30x on any liquidity pool. “We’re super excited to add this layer as a new primitive,” CEO and co-founder Derek Alia told CoinDesk in an interview. “The amount of possibilities now are very, very cool.”
Perpetuals are a crypto-native innovation similar to futures but without an expiration date, enabling users to apply significant leverage to their bets on a given cryptocurrency. While the vehicle is popular for giving traders access to outsize gains, so-called “perps” can also amplify losses, which is why many see them as highly risky.
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The Futureswap raise comes as entrepreneurs and investors alike seek to move the needle on decentralized options trading. While options are widely traded in traditional finance, they remain fairly niche in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) – with perpetuals exchange dYdX being a key exception.
“If you look at what’s going on with dYdX, they recently hit $1 billion in volume, making it one of the most successful crypto projects there is,” Alia said. “We think there’s a very high chance that because we’re leveraging the existing ecosystem, that we could see volumes even higher than that.”
Futureswap will initially run on Arbitrum, a low-fee network that batches transactions before settling them on the Ethereum mainnet.