During this year’s bull market cycle, we’ve witnessed exponential growth in the number of tokens traders want to speculate on. Volumes on long-tail assets have grown significantly, driven by new protocol launches, speculation on the latest trends in DePIN/AI, getting in early on ZK L2s, having fun with memecoins, and more.

While many exchanges have flourished using traditional limit order books (CLOBs), none have yet been able to solve the problem of permissionless derivatives, or the ability to source liquidity without being beholden to centralized gatekeepers such as Binance Launchpad or Coinbase, which often have non-transparent listing requirements, fees, and long lead times. Additionally, CLOB-based exchanges also have design constraints that make it difficult to list a large number of assets, such as the necessity of liquidation insurance funds and commingled liquidation risks across user accounts.

Omni uses a novel peer-to-peer design to solve these problems and provide the first one-stop platform for easily trading perps on thousands of tokens!

Introducing Variational Omni

Omni is our first retail-facing product built on the Variational Protocol, engineered to bring a seamless user experience to trading permissionless perps on any underlying token. With Omni, traders have the unique ability to take long or short positions on new, pre-launch, and points markets before major exchange listings.

Omni offers vertically integrated liquidity through the dedicated Omni Liquidity Provider (OLP), which aggregates liquidity from DEXs, CEXs, and OTC markets, enabling sizable trades with deep liquidity across all markets.

Omni allows users to trade anything, listing thousands of pairs, with more permissionlessly and automatically added every day. Compared to other leading derivatives exchanges, which might list a few dozen (or sometimes up to a hundred) pairs, Omni lists thousands more, including those with small market caps, newly launched tokens that are still under the radar, and the latest trending memecoins.

Design

The Omni Liquidity Provider (OLP) leverages our team’s years of experience building market making algorithms in illiquid assets. It quotes 24/7 across all markets on Omni, allowing users to place large trades, even on relatively thinly traded underlying tokens. OLP aggregates liquidity from DEX, CEX, and OTC sources to provide as much liquidity as possible to Omni users.

Omni is built on the Variational Protocol’s core RFQ and settlement pool infrastructure, allowing for non-custodial bilateral trading. Collateral for your positions is securely locked in an escrow contract on-chain where it is observable and segregated. No third party has access to your assets. Variational’s robust real-time pricing, margin, and liquidation systems are used for settlement and clearing. Due to Variational’s unique design, risk is isolated to individual users and OLP, not shared between users. That is, liquidations in a single user’s settlement pool never affect other users. This is one of the fundamental design decisions that allows us to confidently list thousands of (sometimes volatile) markets, with more added every day.

Omni provides a delightful user experience by being purpose-built for retail perpetuals trading. No lengthy sign-up or account creation process is required–just connect any crypto wallet and start trading. We expect most users to be able to sign up, deposit, and begin trading in 45 seconds or less. All Omni users trade using default simple margin params and liquidation rules, which makes it easy to understand and manage your account balance and collateral. Omni utilizes the latest standards on Ethereum to enable a fully gasless user experience and minimize the number of signature approvals required for common actions such as deposit, withdrawal, and placing an order.

Launch

Omni mainnet will launch later this quarter. At launch, users will be able to trade perps on thousands of tokens with deep liquidity, including DEX pairs, pre-launch tokens, and points markets.

Testnet is now live at https://omni.testnet.variational.io. We welcome feedback from early users in our Discord community.

In the coming weeks, we will share additional information about our product roadmap, testnet incentives, partnerships, and fundraising.

To stay up-to-date with the latest news, follow Variational on X @variational_io.