DeFi derivatives protocol Perennial raises $12 million, launches mainnet

Perennial, a decentralized finance protocol for trading derivatives, raised $12 million in a seed funding round.

Polychain Capital and Variant co-led the round, with Archetype, Coinbase Ventures, Scalar Capital, Robot Ventures and others participating, Perennial said. The project has launched its mainnet.

Perennial was co-founded by Kevin Britz and Arjun Rao. Before Perennial, the duo also co-founded Astro Wallet in 2017, which was acquired by Coinbase in 2019. Both are still working for Coinbase in an advisory capacity, Britz said.

"Perennial is a derivatives protocol that offers a super simple trading experience, a flexible and capital-efficient model for providing liquidity, and a developer primitive that makes composing DeFi derivatives easy," Britz said. The company aims to become the foundational infrastructure in the DeFi derivatives stack.

With its mainnet launch, Perennial is initially offering three markets including long-ether, short-ether and long-squeeth.

"This is just the start," Britz said. "Perennial has a packed roadmap planned out, including more tradable markets, an ecosystem buildout on L2s [Layer 2s], and mechanism design improvements."

Project hiring

It wasn't specified if the funding was raised via equity or token round, but Britz said the Perennial protocol doesn’t have a token at this time. The Perennial product was developed by Perennial Labs, whose parent company  Equilibria was co-founded in June last year by Britz and Rao.

Britz declined to comment on Perennial's current headcount but said the project is hiring across all functions, including engineering, growth, community, and product.

DeFi-related projects have started to receive venture capital injections after a long hiatus. Earlier this week, Uniswap-based DeFi protocol Panoptic raised $4.5 million. Last month, Polkadot-based blockchain interoperability protocol t3rn raised $6.5 million, and Cosmos-based DeFi protocol Onomy raised $10 million in private token funding rounds.