Announcing Perennial, a DeFi-native derivatives protocol backed by Polychain, Variant & Archetype
We are pleased to announce the launch of Perennial, a DeFi-native derivatives protocol, backed by Polychain, Variant, and Archetype.
The DeFi derivatives space is currently emerging from its bootstrapping phase, where on-size-fits-all products with simple but inefficient mechanisms, combined with heavy incentivization, prove out early fundamental demand & use cases. However, these mechanisms that optimize for bootstrapping don’t scale well to service the next stage of growth & innovation. For DeFi derivatives to unlock all that is to come — namely, volumes that greatly surpass that of spot, liquid long-tail derivatives, and a rich ecosystem of financial products built upon derivatives — we need to rethink DeFi derivative mechanism design from first principles.
This is where Perennial comes in.
What is Perennial?
Perennial is a derivatives protocol designed from the ground up to be a DeFi-native primitive.
Rather than rigidly defining a one-size-fits-all product, Perennial follows the design philosophy underlying protocols like Uniswap V3 & Compound III by remaining minimalist & unopinionated at its core, empowering market participants to call the shots on market structure & design decisions. This allows Perennial to meet the needs of a broad set of users, including both novice and sophisticated traders & LPs, as well as developers and protocols who use Perennial as a building block.
Here’s what we’re building toward:
Perennial’s mechanism design combines the best of DeFi & CeFi — Trading on Perennial is both simple & scalable. Perennial uses a DeFi-native trading model: no order books, zero price slippage, and permissionless leverage, plus DeFi-exclusive markets (like Squeeth) & composable positions. On top of this, we’ve built or are building the must-have features professional traders need (more on this later).
Perennial is not a single protocol; it is a collection of protocols intertwined within an ecosystem — Perennial lays the basic foundation upon which many tailored derivative trading experiences can be built. Just about every aspect of Perennial markets can be optimized for a wide spectrum of user sophistication & different use cases. The core protocol is designed to be powerful & hyper-efficient for advanced users, while tooling built on top of the protocol can simplify and automate participation for retail users. The result is a fully customizable trading experience that users & developers can use to chart their own path.
Perennial opens the floodgates for DeFi derivative composability — Perennial is built with all the hooks developers need to easily integrate & compose derivatives, and the no-slippage + MEV-resistant + low fee trading model removes the complexity & risk associated with managing exposure that has traditionally made derivative composability impractical. The next era of finance will be built upon derivatives, and Perennial will be a core catalyst in making this happen.
How does Perennial work?
Perennial enables the creation of two-sided markets that trade exposure to an underlying price feed in a capital efficient manner.
Perennial acts as a peer-to-pool derivatives AMM that perpetually offers to take the other side of any Taker’s position directly at the oracle price, in exchange for a funding rate that floats based on utilization of the liquidity pool (similar to Compound/Aave). Takers (Traders) deposit collateral to get leveraged exposure to different price feeds. Makers (Liquidity Providers) pool capital in the protocol to earn fees for taking the other side of Taker positions. On a continuous, on-going basis, LPs and traders settle up; the losing side of the trade pays the winning side.
Perennial’s initial core features include:
- Peer-to-Pool AMM — trade against a pool of capital
- Zero price slippage — trade directly at the current price, regardless of size.
- Cash-settled — trades, both long & short, settled in $USD, not crypto
- Utilization-based funding rate — funding varies with pool utilization (like Compound)
- Two-sided leverage — Makers & Takers can both open positions with leverage
- Isolated markets — markets & risks are segregated, rather than grouped together
- LP flexibility — LPs customize their market exposure, hedging strategy, leverage, etc.
- Arbitrary exposure — launch markets for any exposure by customizing the payoff function, utilization curve (funding rate), oracle, fee model, etc.
- Permissionless — permissionless market creation, integration, and composability.
…with many additional exciting features in the pipeline for future releases.
For more details, see Perennial’s documentation at docs.perennial.finance.
Perennial $12mn Seed Round
Earlier this year, we raised $12MM in a seed round led by Polychain Capital and Variant, with participation from Archetype, Scalar Capital, Robot Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and a.capital.
In addition to this, we are lucky to have some of the top builders & leaders in the space join the round as angels, including:
- Zubin Koticha & Alexis Gauba (Cofounders of Opyn)
- Sunny Aggarwal (Founder of Osmosis)
- Will Price
- Clinton Bembry & Scott Lewis (Cofounders of Slingshot)
- Pete Kim (Coinbase Wallet & USDC)
- Rob Witoff (CEO at Unit 410)
- Lewis Freiberg (DAO Facilitator)
- Collins Belton
- Sam Rosenblum (Partner at Haun Ventures)
- Katherine Wu (Partner at Archetype)
- Reuben Bramanathan (Partner at IDEO CoLab)
- and more…
Perennial is LIVE!
Perennial V1 is live on mainnet! Check it out here — perennial.finance.
To begin, Perennial will have three markets: Long-ETH, Short-ETH, and Long-Squeeth. We’re starting with a guarded launch and will gradually ramp up the liquidity caps, number of markets, and L2/cross-chain deployments.
Perennial is keen on exploring collaborations with people & groups who will help us build toward our grand vision of becoming foundational infrastructure in the DeFi derivatives stack. If you’re a project or developer, and this gets you excited, get in touch with us (twitter, discord, email below)!
Last but not least, we know that any successful DeFi protocol is contingent upon the support of its early users and the continued incentive alignment of the ecosystem. We take this to heart and will ensure that our supporters (traders, LPs, developers, etc.) are always empowered.
Join us — We’re hiring!
We’re a group from Coinbase, Polychain, Uniswap, and Crypto Twitter (anon) who are laser focused on building the next generation of decentralized finance. We’re going to build a lot of cool stuff — Perennial V1 is just the start :)
We’re hiring across all functions. If you’re interested in getting to know us more, shoot us a note on twitter, discord, or email (community@perennial.finance). We’d love to chat!
