Perpetual Protocol, a decentralized cryptocurrency derivatives protocol that offers a range of perpetual contracts, has unveiled Curie, version 2 of the protocol.
This upgrade enables Perpetual Protocol to further drive greater trading volume through a more efficient distribution of liquidity. Perpetual Protocol is currently one of the top decentralized derivatives protocols with nearly 18B in volume since launch last December.
Using vAMMs (virtual Automated Market Makers) to avoid order books, Perpetual Protocol draws comparisons to Uniswap. However, an important difference with the vAMM is that no token swap is occurring – only derivative contracts are exchanged.
“With Curie, we’re not only increasing capital efficiency for decentralized perpetual contracts trading. We are also enabling market makers to create their own customized trading strategies; by employing vAMMs to provide leveraged and concentrated liquidity. This can be done without the deep liquidity base needed before, and it is a significant opportunity for traders.”
– Yenwen Feng, Co-Founder of Perpetual Protocol
v2: Curie
The key enhancement provided by Curie will allow market makers to provide liquidity across narrow price ranges, maximizing capital efficiency using a method inspired by Uniswap v3.
Curie opens the way for dramatically greater scaling and thus larger trading volumes. In turn, this increased volume will increase fees received by makers and stakers alike.
Perpetual Protocol will launch Curie on Arbitrum and other L2 solutions, allowing several thousand trades to occur per second. Besides huge improvements in transaction speed, Curie will support cross-margin, meaning that traders can open multiple positions with the entire balance in their account as the collateral.
In future updates, traders will be able to use multiple assets as collateral to open positions, unlike in Perpetual Protocol v1 where USDC was the sole collateral option available.
Curie will support Chainlink and Uniswap v3 TWAP as Oracle providers for the index price, permeaning that if an asset has a price feed on either platform, anyone can create a perpetual market for it.
As a part of Curie, Perpetual Protocol is also improving security. First, curie further decentralizes the risk to the protocol insurance fund. Curie restructures how funding payments are made or received; which further stabilizes the insurance fund and makes the protocol more secure.
Perpetual Protocol raised $1.8 million in funding led by Multicoin Capital, last August. Later that year in December they launched on mainnet and since then have facilitated over 3 million perpetual swaps.