Pantera Leads $5 Million Round for Decentralized Derivatives Market

A protocol built to put financial middlemen out of business has secured a $5 million seed round led by Pantera Capital.

The Vega Protocol aims to make it feasible for people anywhere in the world to spin up markets for derivatives that can interact with each other and abide by relevant regulations.

"We see the value to be in the network, really," Mannerings said, predicting that the company would shift its work to a foundation eventually.

The funding round will be used to build out the software to fulfill Vega's vision, and also support establishing a nascent community of developers and potential users of the protocol, Mannerings said.

Vega is a Layer 2 solution for trading derivatives in a non-custodial and secure fashion.

"It's a fairly ambitious project in terms of the complexity of the software," Mannerings said.

"The ethereum network is not great at running computationally intensive," Mannerings said.

In what Mannerings described as a sort of second release, Vega will be able to conform to the rules of any given country and verify that the user is really under that jurisdiction.

Further, the software will open up tools for creating more kinds of derivatives.

"We wouldn't be doing this if we thought the only people who would be using it would be crypto-native ICOs and bitcoin and such," Mannerings said.