Variational, a peer-to-peer on-chain derivatives trading protocol, said it raised $50 million in a round led by global investment fund Dragonfy with participation from the likes of 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. The increase comes just as Variational introduces perpetual futures tied to real-world assets (RWA), such as gold, silver, copper, and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil.
“We believe 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, it has a market capitalization of 1.6 trillion dollars. Ether (ETH), the second largest, has $256 billion. Combined, they represent almost 68% of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization.
Variational said it has handled more than $200 billion in trading volume since its inception in 2025, and that the new funds will allow it to build the infrastructure needed to direct liquidity directly from traditional markets in the coming months. Its model is designed exclusively to aggregate and channel liquidity from traditional and on-chain markets, avoiding the need to build it from scratch in 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+ on-chain offenders by adding liquidity from the source, rather than rebuilding thin order books for each new listing,” Schuermann said.
Dragonfly’s investment comes two months after it announced a $650 million raise, which at the time was one of the largest in the sector, when many blockchain-focused venture capitalists were struggling, said managing partner Haseeb Qureshi. The firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this new investment.
