Variational Secures $1.5 Million Strategic Funding Round

Variational, a protocol for peer-to-peer derivatives trading on Arbitrum, has announced a $1.5 million strategic funding round. The investment comes from Mirana Ventures, Caladan, Zoku Ventures, and other key partners. This follows Variational’s September announcement of their $10.3 million seed round and the launch of the Omni Mainnet Private Beta.

Omni, the platform powered by Variational, allows users to trade perpetual futures on hundreds of markets with zero fees. Unlike traditional platforms, Omni does not use order books. Instead, it relies on a request-for-quote infrastructure and its own vertically integrated market maker called the Omni Liquidity Provider (OLP).

Lucas V. Schuermann, Founder and CEO of Variational, stated that the strategic round aimed to align partners who can contribute to Variational’s long-term growth. These partners include market makers who can assist with OLP and well-connected teams who can introduce Omni to traders. Since launching the Omni Private Beta in January, Variational has onboarded thousands of waitlisted users, processed over $100M in volume, and achieved an 87% annualized yield for the soon-to-be-public OLP vault.

To further expand its user base, Variational has launched the first iteration of its referral program. Users can invite their friends to Omni after hitting a volume threshold, and these referrals can be used to gain access to the Private Beta. While details on the rewards for referrals will be shared in the future, Variational has committed to incentivizing this program. The full announcement of the referral program can be found on Variational’s blog.

John Gu, co-founder and CEO at Caladan, highlighted that Variational’s unique market design offers differentiated pricing for different types of flow. This means retail traders will see better prices and a broader set of offerings, avoiding the costs of sharp flow from high-frequency trading on orderbook markets. Gu expressed excitement about retail traders taking advantage of the zero fees, tight pricing, and large variety of tokens available on Omni.

Looking ahead, Variational’s roadmap for the remainder of 2025 includes implementing loss rebates and other novel reward mechanisms, releasing Omni’s public mainnet, announcing mainnet incentives, and opening up the OLP vault for community deposits. Users interested in obtaining a referral code to access the private beta are recommended to join the Variational Discord.

Variational is a peer-to-peer trading protocol for perpetuals and generalized derivatives. It automates the process of trading and clearing end-to-end for safe bilateral trading of options, futures, perpetuals, and more. The protocol powers Omni, a perps trading platform with zero fees and hundreds of markets, many of which have no other listings. Variational is built by a veteran team with decades of experience in market making and software engineering at top firms, and is backed by Coinbase Ventures, Bain Capital Crypto, Dragonfly, and more.