Peer-to-peer trading startup Variational raises $50 million for real-world perps in funding round led by Dragonfly

Peer-to-peer trading startup Variational raises $50 million for real-world perps in funding round led by DragonflyThe company is initially offering perpetual futures on real-world assets including oil, silver, copper and gold. May 21, 2026, 1:57 p.m. 2 min readMake preferred on Variational, a peer-to-peer onchain derivatives trading protocol, said it raised $50 million in a round led by global investment fund Dragonfy with participation from companies including 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 raise comes just as Variational introduces perpetual futures tied to real-world assets (RWAs) such as gold, silver, copper and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil."We believe RWA perpetuals will soon be the biggest contract class in decentralized finance (DeFi), bigger than bitcoin and ether combined,” Lucas V. Schuermann, CEO and co-founder at Variational, told CoinDesk.Bitcoin BTC$77,027.07, the largest cryptocurrency, has a market capitalization of $1.6 trillion. Ether (ETH), the second-biggest, has $256 billion. Combined, they account for almost 68% of the total cryptocurrency market cap.Variational said it has carried more than $200 billion in trading volume since its inception in 2025, and the new funds will enable it to build the infrastructure needed to route liquidity directly from traditional markets within the coming months. Its model is uniquely designed to aggregate and route liquidity from traditional and onchain markets, avoiding the need to build it from scratch on 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 plus onchain perps by aggregating 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, at the time was one of the largest in the sector, when many blockchain-focused VCs were struggling, Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi said. The firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this new investment.More For YouThe crypto financial services firm submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC as it explores a public listing amid renewed momentum in digital asset markets.What to know: Blockchain.com confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO with the SEC.The number of shares to be offered and the proposed price range have not yet been determined.The filing comes as crypto IPO momentum has cooled following weaker market conditions and poor post-listing performances from some newly public firms.Read full story