As we enter 2025, the year of the Omni mainnet, we wanted to take a step back to celebrate the massive success that was 2024. From exiting stealth, to launching our internal Omni mainnet and getting team members trading with real dollars, it’s been a busy year!

Here are some of the highlights:

Exited Stealth & Launched the Variational Pro Testnet

On February 8th, 2024, the first public article about Variational was published on our Mirror page. The article outlined the high-level vision of a highly customizable request-for-quote trading protocol. When we published this article, the @variational_io X/Twitter account was just one week old!

On the same day, the Variational Pro testnet went live on Arbitrum Sepolia, demonstrating an early version of the protocol.

Launched the Variational Omni Testnet

While doing user research on the Pro Testnet, we realized that the technology powering Pro – the Variational protocol – could also be used to create a retail-friendly perps trading platform. A few months later, on April 24th, we published an article announcing the Variational Omni testnet.

Announced Seed Round Funding

After a summer of heads-down building (and making a couple hires) we announced our seed round funding on October 23rd, led by Peak XV (FKA Sequoia India) and Bain Capital Crypto, with support from other industry leaders like Coinbase Ventures, Hack VC, Dragonfly Capital, and more.

This announcement brought a surge of attention to Variational, and accelerated the growth of our already fast-growing community.

Hosted Testnet Trading Competitions

Starting in the summer, we hosted three different Omni testnet trading competitions for the Variational community. Each of these competitions had $2k USDC in prizes, along with NFT rewards.

These competitions always brought us our highest user numbers, and were a fantastic exercise in stress-testing the protocol and observing more “real” user behavior.

Launched the Omni Internal Mainnet

Right before the holiday season, we launched the Omni mainnet internally for team members as a final sanity check before the private mainnet. Since mid-December, Variational team members have been trading perps on Omni with real dollars on Arbitrum!

Conclusion & Looking Forward

In summary, our focus in 2024 has been to set the stage for 2025. With the new year upon us, we’ll be working to get the private Omni mainnet launched so select community members can begin trading on the platform with real money.

After a few months of testing in the private mainnet, we’ll open the floodgates with the public Omni mainnet launch, at which point anyone (excluding restricted persons of course!) can start trading on Omni.

Keep a close eye on our socials over these next few months. Things are going to start getting interesting!