Toward Credibly Neutral Derivatives: Announcing Our Investment Into Vega

March 18, 2021 Ninos Mansor

Like a prison tattoo, March 12 2020 is branded into every crypto trader’s mind. Nobody can forget the terror of that fated candle. No trader will ever escape the disbelief of watching a derivatives market that developed over years break within minutes.

Crypto desperately needs credibly neutral derivatives. A year from this PTSD-inducing moment of market history and not much has changed. Put aside the fact that we still don’t know what happened on that day the majority of derivatives volume is still executed off-chain in the opaque land of the centralized exchange.

The market needs decentralized derivatives that can match the centralized experience, a place where traders can take on leverage, move capital efficiently and hedge risk without worrying about something breaking or someone squeezing them behind a curtain.

We are thrilled to announce our investment into Vega Protocol, which we believe will be the most important player in this emerging world of decentralized derivatives. We are excited to co-lead the round with Cumberland DRW, one of our closest trading partners. The round brings together a strong group of trading firms and DeFi investors including ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, CMT Digital, Signum Capital, DeFi Alliance, CMS Holdings, Three Commas, SevenX Ventures, GSR, ZeePrime Capital and more.

Vega marries the ingenuity of DeFi with the hard-won wisdom of order books. It unites the AMM with the CLOB, breaking the dichotomy between active and passive liquidity. In Vega, market makers are owner-operators, incentivized to seed markets; while passive LPs provide liquidity to their strategies. The team complements this novel economic design with a heavy focus on risk management and capital efficiency, pioneering solutions to challenges like frontrunning, multi-chain collateral and scalability.

A snapshot of the Vega exchange interface.

We are stoked to get behind a team of world-class entrepreneurs, engineers, academics and traders and will publish more on our investment in the coming months.

Toward the Wild West Net!

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/18/vega-raises-5m-to-give-anyone-the-ability-to-launch-a-derivatives-market/
Crunchbase: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/vega-banks-5m-to-create-derivatives-trading-protocol/
The Block: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/98742/defi-derivatives-protocol-vega-5-million-coinbase-ventures-others

Vega Roadmap: https://blog.vega.xyz/announcing-the-vega-2021-roadmap-4c3c0d80efc0
Vega TestNet: https://testnet.vega.trading/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vegaprotocol
Telegram: https://t.me/vegacommunity
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/ZNEMCYd