Trading-focused blockchain Vega Protocol today rolled out perpetual futures markets, a type of futures product with no expiration date, on the network.
These perpetuals on Vega are in addition to existing offerings offered since Vega’s mainnet release in March 2023, including cash-settled futures markets.
They will not have permission, which means that community members will make proposals and vote to decide on specific assets for which eternal futures will be created. With this development, Vega wades into a crowded field that includes dYdX, GMX, Gains, Synthetix, Perpetual Protocol and several others.
Vega wants to differentiate its perpetual offering by empowering the community to use on-chain governance to introduce permissionless markets.
Additionally, the project’s community-led board will have the ability to approve any ERC-20 settlement token through the governance mechanism, which deviates from the norm of limiting settlements to USDC or equivalent stablecoins.
“This release is a huge step forward for Vega and the next generation of DeFi. It brings perpetual futures, the most popular crypto-settled derivatives product – and one of the community’s most requested features – to Vega’s open and permissionless network,” said Barney Mannerings, co-founder of Vega Protocol.
The Vega blockchain
Since launching the alpha mainnet in March, Vega has seen trading volume of more than $850 million on its futures markets alone, according to data from the team.
The project has its white paper in 2018, which described a performance-optimized blockchain with a Tendermint proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Designed to meet the intense demands of crypto derivatives trading, Vega offers low latency and high scalability, and features a decentralized limit order book (dCLOB) on its blockchain infrastructure.
In 2019, Vega secured a $5 million seed funding round led by Pantera Capital and increased another $43 million through a community token sale on CoinList in 2021.
Vega Protocol is secured by validators who participate by staking the Vega token. This token is currently trading at a price of $1.2 with a market cap of $70 million, according to The Block’s price data.
