Avantis – The Next Generation Perpetuals DEX, Launches Today on Base Mainnet

[PRESS RELEASE – New York, United States, February 2nd, 2024]

Avantis Testnet saw more than $5.5 billion in trading volumes in just two months of testing since November, and the mainnet launch includes an industry-first product, Avantis Loss Protection

Avantis, the next generation DEX for trading and market-making perpetuals for crypto and real world assets, launched on Base mainnet today. During the two months of testnet, Avantis saw more than 400,000 trades from more than 50,000 onchain traders transacting more than $5.5 billion in volumes, on a TVL (total value locked) base of $120M. The company is backed by Pantera, Galaxy, Base Ecosystem Fund, Founders Fund and Modular Capital.

With Avantis, onchain traders can utilize up to 75x leverage and get exposure to price movements across crypto, forex and commodities. Liquidity providers can fine-tune their risk-return profile, while earning trading fees by passively making markets for these trades. Avantis is launching its new Loss Protection product, a novel, industry-first mechanism that protects traders who take a contrarian view against the market by guaranteeing that they get a certain rebate on any trading losses. Testnet traders earned a cumulative rebate of $450K across ~20,500 loss-protected trades, for taking contrarian trades and helping balance platform open interest (OI). Once live on mainnet, Avantis Loss Protection will generate real savings for traders on their losses. Avantis has 22 trading pairs available at launch today, with more to come.

To ensure economic security, competitive fees for traders, and protection for liquidity providers, Avantis has partnered with Chaos Labs, the leader in risk simulations and protocol economics. Chaos Labs’ designed and optimized trading parameters go live today on Avantis mainnet. Avantis has been audited by both Zellic and Zokyo, and the audit reports are available for all to view via Avantis’ documentation.

“There’s a large set of perpetual DEXs in the market, and yet it’s one of the only sectors in DeFi that’s still 100x behind its CeFi counterparts, which shows the immense whitespace for innovation at the protocol level,” said Avantis Cofounder and CEO, Harsehaj Singh. “This is why we’re so excited for Avantis’ beta launch on mainnet as it’s our first step towards contributing towards the growth of the onchain trading and stablecoin economy on Base.”

Throughout testnet, Avantis witnessed the robustness of its risk-return tooling for liquidity providers, consistently seeing highly organic trading fee APRs, ranging from 20%-100% depending on the LPs unique risk profile. Out of 5,600 LPs on the platform, ~1,900 locked their capital for some time, showing the demand for boosted returns in exchange for long-term behavior. Avantis plans to continue testing and refining these mechanisms with real world data.

In the coming months, Avantis plans to ship multiple product updates including funding rates, one-click trading, gas sponsored trades, their own L2 built on the OP stack, and novel real world asset pairs like Crude-oil and treasury rates.

The Avantis Edge:

Hyperscaling DeFi Market Making: Onchain perpetual DEXs haven’t had their Uniswap V3 moment. Avantis offers sophisticated tools to liquidity providers (LPs) like risk tranches and time locking, allowing each LP to customize their unique risk-reward profile, creating a stickier liquidity flywheel.
Democratized RWA Adoption: Perpetuals have barely touched non-crypto asset classes like commodities and forex, but demand for leveraged trading in these markets is very strong. While there is already strong RWA tokenization by top DeFi protocols, these offerings are gated to accredited institutions and are geared towards long term holders, not traders. Avantis enables forex and commodities to be hedged and traded onchain, without the need for 1:1 tokenization
Loss Protected Trading: Avantis offers guaranteed rebates on traders’ losses, as long as their trades help balance platform OI. This is in contrast to funding rates, which are the traditional way of balancing long-short skew (and are often unpredictable and geared towards basis traders). This is an industry first for any exchange of any kind (regardless of centralized or decentralized).
Fully Decentralized: Everything from execution, settlement, liquidations and market-making (via liquidity providers) occurs on chain

About Avantis

Avantis is a decentralized leveraged trading and market-making platform that allows users to trade cryptocurrency, forex and commodities with up to 75x leverage, or power trades on the platform as a liquidity provider. Avantis gives sophisticated risk management tools to traders and liquidity providers for the use and provision of trading leverage. Avantis is built on Coinbase’s Base blockchain, and is backed by industry leading investors such as Pantera, Founders Fund, Galaxy and Base Ecosystem Fund. For more information, visit https://www.avantisfi.com/.