This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
A new perps DEX is entering the chat.
The team exclusively told me that Perpl, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange, raised $9.25 million from Dragonfly to build on Monad.
Other participants in the round include Ergonia, Brevan Howard, Breed, L1D and CMS.
I had a chance to speak with co-founder PB, who told me that he and his cofounder — both Americans — left the US to build Perpl in London. They’ve since hired a London-based team. Surprise, surprise, the decision came due to the lack of regulatory clarity in the US.
PB isn’t writing off the US entirely, though, noting that if the laws change, Perpl would consider opening up to the market — it’s just not currently in the cards.
Perpetual futures, or perps, are becoming more of a popular product, especially in crypto. Just last week, Coinbase teased that 24/7 perps were “coming soon” after announcing 24/7 futures trading.
“I think the thing with perps, specifically, is how simple it is. With options, there’s just a lot of complexity. There are expirations, there’s just a lot more math for users to be aware of. But perps, it’s very simple, never expires,” PB explained.
“You just have to keep track of liquidations. And then that also helps with getting all the liquidity in one place. With options, since you have expirations, you have liquidity each month, but with perps, all liquidity for the assets is in the same place. More liquidity, better trading experience.”
What PB noticed is that crypto traders like the ease of access that perps offer. There’s also the added benefit that a project like Perpl can move faster on a token listing than, say, a Coinbase.
“With perps, you just need an oracle price and USDC, and you can start immediately taking a position. If you were to rewind back to maybe a couple of years ago, you needed a Binance or one of these central exchanges to actually list perps, but with DEXs, they’re able to list these tokens faster,” he explained.
Perps DEXs are “broken in a very interesting way,” PB told me. Basically, there are infrastructure and engineering issues and then the DEXs make some trade-offs to account for them, but Perpl claims to be different.
“What Hyperliquid has done with a cloud-based perp DEX has shown that the market appetite is there for something that has a deep liquidity. What we’re really excited for is to see how the composability angle plays out with that,” he added.
