Variational, a peer-to-peer onchain derivatives trading protocol, said it raised $50 million in a round led by global investment fund Dragonfy with participation from firms including Bain Capital Crypto and Coinbase Ventures.
The money will be used to expand the Cayman Island-based company’s derivatives trading services, it said in a statement released Thursday. The increase comes just as Variational introduces perpetual futures linked to real assets (RWAs) such as gold, silver, copper and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil.
“We believe that RWA perpetuals will soon be the largest contract class 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 account for nearly 68% of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization.
Variational said it has carried 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 route liquidity directly from traditional markets in the coming months. Its model is uniquely designed to aggregate and direct liquidity from traditional and onchain markets, avoiding the need to build it from scratch on isolated marginal order books, the company said.
“Our Series A secures the capital and partners we need to bring [traditional finance] TradFi-grade depth to 100 plus onchain perps by pooling liquidity from the source rather than rebuilding thin order books for each new listing,” said Schuermann.
Dragonfly’s investment comes two months after it announced a $650 million raise, then one of the largest in a sector where many blockchain-focused VCs were struggling, said Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi. The firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this new investment.
