CVEX, a decentralized exchange partly owned by Lars Seier Christensen, the founder of Saxo Bank, is gearing up to launch its mainnet on Arbitrum Stylus. Mark your calendars for January 8! They’ve already attracted over 400,000 users eager for early access and have built a community of millions on social media.
This exchange focuses on trading crypto futures and options. It’s stepping into a market largely dominated by the centralized exchange Deribit, which is based in Panama. James Davies, the CEO and co-founder of CVEX, points out an interesting fact: while futures and options are huge in traditional markets, crypto derivatives are still quite small.
Why is that? Well, many large centralized exchanges have gone for payment licenses that don’t allow for derivatives trading. However, a regulatory gap about perpetuals has opened the door for these products. Davies believes this gap could lead to significant growth in the options market within crypto. He noted, “We've got a perpetual-based market because nobody built infrastructure outside of that.”
He also mentioned that there are thousands of projects looking to hedge risks. Many would prefer to trade options on-chain rather than dealing with expensive over-the-counter options.
CVEX is set to use Arbitrum Stylus, a fast and affordable Ethereum overlay that supports WebAssembly-compatible languages. This means users can avoid the hefty funding fees often associated with perpetual futures on other platforms. In fact, CVEX claims their trading fees could be “up to 16 times lower” than those of traditional centralized exchanges. Makers will pay just 0.002%, while takers will pay only 0.003%.
This launch follows a successful $7 million fundraising round earlier this year, co-led by SALT and Fabric Ventures. Other contributors include AMDAX, Wave Digital, Funfair Ventures, Seier Capital, Five T Fintech, and Saxon.