Polychain Capital and Variant led a $12 million round of financing for Perennial, an innovative finance infrastructure that enables the trading of derivatives.

Early this year, the company raised funds. However, it took a month to announce this information after the break-down of crypto exchange FTX, which put a spotlight on crypto projects in general.

A number of angel investors contributed to the round, according to a single draft Medium post.

Perennial is a platform that brings together traders and liquidity providers. One side can deposit assets to get leveraged exposure to different price feeds, while the other side pools capital in order to earn fees for taking the other side of trader positions. The losing side of the trade pays the winning side. Perennial’s initial features also include no-slippage trades and U.S. dollar settlement rather than in crypto tokens.

Built as a non-custodial DeFi protocol, Perennial is fully on-chain and features open source code. This means that users are always in charge of their own funds and can easily review the actions or behaviors of the protocol.

“At the protocol level, Perennial is starting with a relatively small risk, only opening up if it can identify a way to be confident of multiple profit for each 10% risk level. Perennial has a no-nonsense approach and uses industry standard Chainlink oracles.”

“We can deploy our platform first on the Ethereum mainnet, but we intend to soon build out a layer 2 ecosystem,” Phillips said. “After that we’ll ramp up the number of tradable markets we offer.”

Perennial was founded by Kevin Britz and Arjun Rao, who previously co-founded the smart contract wallet Astro Wallet that was acquired by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN). Earlier this year, Martin Phillips joined as the company’s first hire after previously working at Polychain Capital, a research-focused VC firm focused on blockchain technology.