DeFi Protocol Perennial Launches, Announces $12M in Funding

Perennial, a decentralized-finance (DeFi) platform used to trade derivatives, has gone live with a $12 million seed funding round that was led by Polychain Capital and Variant.

The capital raise happened earlier this year, but the firm just announced it, a month after the collapse of centralized exchange FTX, which put a spotlight on the viability of all crypto projects.

Other investors in the round included Archetype, Scalar Capital, Robot Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, a.capital and a number of angel investors, according to a draft Medium post provided to CoinDesk.

Perennial enables the creation of two-sided markets made up of traders and liquidity providers. Traders deposit assets to get leveraged exposure to different price feeds, while the liquidity providers pool capital to earn fees for taking the other side of trader positions. The losing side of the trade pays the winning side. Perennial’s initial core features also include zero price slippage – trades happen directly at the current price regardless of size – and trades that are settled in U.S. dollars instead of crypto.

“Perennial is built as a non-custodial DeFi protocol that is fully on-chain with open source code,” Perennial operations head Jacob Phillips told CoinDesk in an email. “This means users always control their own funds and can easily verify any of the actions/behaviors of the protocol.

“At the protocol level, Perennial is starting with a guarded launch and conservative risk parameters,” he continued. “Perennial has a robust liquidation engine and uses battle-tested Chainlink oracles.”

The platform will be released initially on main network of the Ethereum blockchain, but Perennial will soon begin building out its layer 2 ecosystem. The startup will then ramp up the number of its tradable markets, Phillips said.

Perennial was co-founded by Kevin Britz and Arjun Rao, who previously co-founded the early smart contract wallet Astro Wallet that was acquired by crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN). Phillips, who previously worked as a researcher and crypto-focused venture-capital firm Polychain Capital, joined earlier this year as Perennial’s first hire.

Read more: Crypto Derivatives DEXs Reposition for Life After FTX