Variational Announces $1.5 Million Strategic Round And Launches Referral Program

[PRESS RELEASE – George Town,, Cayman Islands, June 4th, 2025]

Variational powers Omni, a platform that allows users to trade perpetual futures on hundreds of markets with zero fees.

Variational, a protocol for peer-to-peer derivatives trading on Arbitrum, announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in strategic funding from Mirana Ventures, Caladan, Zoku Ventures (FKA Superpotion), and other key partners. This follows Variational’s September announcement of their $10.3 million seed round and launch of the Omni Mainnet Private Beta.

Omni is a perps trading platform built on the Variational Protocol that supports hundreds of markets with zero trading fees and tight spreads. Omni does not use orderbooks, instead relying on request-for-quote infrastructure and its own vertically integrated market maker called the Omni Liquidity Provider (OLP).

“Our goal with this strategic round was to align additional partners who can help supercharge Variational’s long-term growth,” said Lucas V. Schuermann, Founder and CEO of Variational. “Whether it’s market makers able to assist with OLP or well-connected teams able to help introduce Omni to traders, each participant in this round will directly contribute to our success.”

Since launching the Omni Private Beta last January, Variational has announced that Omni will permanently have zero fees, onboarded thousands of waitlisted users, processed over $100M in volume, and achieved a 87% annualized yield for the soon-to-be-public OLP vault. Today, Variational is taking the next step in opening up the Omni Private Beta by releasing the first iteration of its referral program: allowing users to invite their friends to Omni.

“Building a strong organic community around Variational has always been one of our primary goals,” said Max Bibeau, Head of Growth at Variational. “Launching the first version of our referral program will allow Omni to grow our core community through word-of-mouth, while also giving our earliest supporters an opportunity to be rewarded.”

Omni’s referral program launches today: users unlock a referral code after hitting a volume threshold, and gain the ability to refer additional users based on volume traded. These codes can then be used to invite users to Omni’s Private Beta–currently the only way to gain access. While Variational has committed to incentivizing referrals, details will be shared in the future when rewards claims are live. The Variational team’s full announcement of the referral program can be found on their blog.

“Variational’s unique market design offers differentiated pricing for different types of flow. As a result, retail traders will see better prices and a broader set of offerings, instead of implicitly bearing the costs of sharp flow from HFT-type on orderbook markets,” said John Gu, co-founder and CEO at Caladan. “We’re excited to see retail traders take advantage of the zero fees and tight pricing, as well as the large variety of tokens.”

Variational’s roadmap for the remainder of 2025 includes implementing loss rebates and other novel reward mechanisms, releasing Omni’s public mainnet, announcing mainnet incentives, and opening up the OLP vault for community deposits. Progress can be followed on Variational’s X Account. Users interested in obtaining a referral code to access the private beta are recommended to join the Variational Discord.

About Variational

Variational is a peer-to-peer trading protocol for perpetuals and generalized derivatives. Variational automates the process of trading and clearing end-to-end for safe bilateral trading of options, futures, perpetuals, and more. Variational Protocol powers Omni, which is a perps trading platform with zero fees and hundreds of markets, many of which have no other listings.

Variational is built by a veteran team with decades of experience in market making and software engineering at top firms, and is backed by Coinbase Ventures, Bain Capital Crypto, Dragonfly, and more.

For more information, users can visit https://variational.io.