Fun fact about @variational_io: protocol development has been funded by our past trading profits, not VC capital. In late 2021, when @mr_plumpkin and I left one of the largest crypto trading desks, we decided to start our own market making firm. We called it Variational, and raised $10M in equity for our trading strategies. From 2021 to 2023 we were active on virtually every CEX/DEX on the market, including acting as an early liquidity provider/design partner to many of the most prominent DeFi projects of the last few years. After trading on every major platform, we still saw huge gaps in the DeFi derivatives market, and decided to build the Variational Protocol using a radically different design. Almost all of our operations, including developing the Variational Protocol and apps on top of it (Omni and Pro), have been funded by trading profits from the market making strategies we ran from 2021 to 2023. The infrastructure from Variational’s prop trading days now forms the core of the Omni Liquidity Provider. “Democratizing market making” isn’t just a tagline for us—we’re taking algorithms and code we’ve perfected over years and making them accessible to community depositors.