SJ

Excited to share that I’ve joined @variational_io as Head of APAC. I'm excited to help drive this amazing team's growth across the APAC region. Currently based in Tokyo, but always open to collaborations anywhere. Feel free to reach out!

We were humbled to see so much coverage of our raise & initial RWA launch last week! Here's a few our team loved:

Platinum $XPT perps are now live with zero fees, and up to 50x leverage.

One *massively* underappreciated fact about Variational: ~~We haven’t released a trading API yet~~ That means trades are manual "click trades" from real humans. No bot farms diluting the pool. Future tokens are going straight to actual users, which is surprisingly rare in this industry.

The reason why no perps aggregator has ever taken off is because perps are not fungible. One position on exchange A is not exchangeable or transferable to exchange B. This is why you need a sophisticated intermediary to handle the operational nonsense for you. That's the UX unlock.

Yes, 1B. And we're just getting started.

gvar 🇭🇰

Coming soon in Phase 2: TradFi liquidity for 100+ new RWA listings.

Just days after launching, the first few RWA markets already account for over 6% of total OI and 10% of trading volume on Variational.

特大資金調達したvariationalのCo-Founderの Lucus @variational_lvs と対談させてもらい、資金調達の話や狙う市場、圧倒的な優位性など話を聞きました。 私は期待度MAXになって、残り4ヶ月本気でvariationalのエアドロ狙いにいきます！！ 目次 ✅ Lucusの背景とValの立ち上げ ✅ 競合と異なるMM&ブローカーモデル ✅ トータルコスト最安 ✅ RWAの覇権を取る ✅ 資金調達の目的 ✅ エアドロ情報 ✅ ポイント最大ブーストの紹介コード 長くなるのでツリー投稿します。もちろんdyorで。 続く)

SpaceX $SPCX 🚀

Variational just raised $50M and cemented its place among the leading on-chain perp DEXs, with $219B in lifetime volume and $782M in open interest. But the headline misses the more interesting story. @variational_io isn't building another perp DEX. It's bringing TradFi liquidity on-chain with a brokerage-like model: one account, every asset class, liquidity aggregated from the dealers powering the underlying markets. Where most perp DEXs extract revenue by taking fees on trades, Variational vertically integrates its own liquidity engine to capture organic market-making yield instead. Spread shared, not extracted. The result: users have saved over $100M in fees, the protocol treasury crossed $2M USDC, and lifetime OLP PnL stands at $12.98M. Zero fees as a structural feature, not a subsidy. Beyond revenue, the sunset mechanism has refunded $4.55M in historical losses back to users. Almost no other perp DEX builds this into protocol design. This foundation is what makes the RWA rollout credible. Phase 1 (WTI, XAU, XAG) isn't a launch. It's stress-testing the pipes, pushing the cross-margin engine to its limits with crypto-native RWAs before scaling. That's quant-first engineering discipline. Once the pipes are tested, Phase 2 will bring 100+ TradFi markets on-chain in one move: Nvidia, MicroStrategy, Alibaba, Coinbase, wheat, soybeans, natural gas. From crypto perps to a universal trading venue, Variational is combining the execution quality of a traditional prime broker with the instant settlement of DeFi.

@IPALAU1 @variational_io @variational_lvs @sishido1011 gVar!

Had lunch in Tokyo with the Variational team. After wrapping up the first AMA in Korea yesterday, I visited Tokyo and had lunch with the @variational_io team (@variational_lvs, @sjl933, and @sishido1011). We celebrated the successful AMA and talked about Variational’s strategy for Korea and eventually the global market. Just like the last time we met, I really felt that Variational isn’t just a good project — the founders and team have an amazing vibe too. Smart, genuine, and fun. It really makes me want to keep building with them. Looking forward to being part of Variational’s journey. gVar

I want to offer a nuanced response to this, because some points here are correct and some are not. > Orderbooks like Lighter are venue for Price Discovery; where the price is set. The price is based on supply and demand. I agree that the primary purpose of orderbooks is for price discovery: if new information comes out and HFTs need to update the price in microseconds then orderbooks allow for that. Highly dubious whether any DEXes are setup for that, but that's besides the main point. > RFQ models like Variational is a venue for Price Taking. It literally copies the price from elsewhere; physically cannot offer better pricing than the venue it hedges on without taking directional risk. I would say a more accurate framing is we won't be offering a worse price than the aggregate of all venues we have liquidity access to? If a venue has the deepest orderbooks in the world for a specific market we'll just integrate. Again, highly dubious whether a DEX is the primary venue for any market. This also ignores an important point about economies of scale. We are a top 20 trader on many of the top CEXes, and get preferential fee tiers. To put this into perspective, Hyperliquid fees start at 4.5bps whereas our BTC all-in cost for the user starts at 0.3bps! That's literally a 10x difference right off the bat. Third, in fortuitous circumstances, sometimes one user is buying and another is selling. This allows us to net out the risk without going out to a hedging venue at all. That's pure price improvement for the user. > In orderbook: If you see a price and click buy, you get filled There is no guarantee you get filled at a specific price, the market could've moved in the meantime. To be fair this is not unique to orderbooks, RFQs suffer from the same problem. It's just physics, it takes time to process your order. > The MM (or OLP) looks at your request, looks at the market, and then decides if they want to take the trade. While it is true that OLP generally doesn't want to take trades that are instantly losing if the market has shifted, important to know that in our design last look is mutual. Users can set a slippage limit which will reject all quotes outside their price band. Note that the slippage is defined against the most recent mark price (the same that OLP is using, it doesn't have a latency edge over the user). A trade only goes through when the taker and maker mutually find the price acceptable, which is fundamentally what markets are supposed to be about.

Variationalの大型資金調達は見ておくべき。 RFQというブローカーの仕組みにより、取り扱い銘柄数が多いので選択肢として用意しておくと便利なPerpDEX。 しかも手数料無料なのがありがたい。まあ、マイナーな銘柄ほど板薄くてスリッページが高くなってしまうけど。 ビジネスモデル的にはスプレッドで稼ぐモデルです。 $LAB のデルタニュートラルでもお世話になったので、個人的にも最近よく触ってます。 ただ、まだ取引APIが開放されてないので手動取引のみ。逆に取引APIが解放されたら一気にAIエージェントやBOTが利用すると思うので、エアドロ的には今が触っておくチャンスか。

🇰🇷 seoul.co.kr/news/economy/2…

🇯🇵

Lighter announces RFQ because it'll give you better execution and lower slippage? Oh ok cool

Variational $50M Series A Round⚡️ 📑 About: @variational_io is a peer-to-peer trading protocol for perpetuals and generalized derivatives. 🤝 Investors: @dragonfly_xyz (Lead), @cbventures, and @BainCapCrypto