Investors including NFX, Shima Capital, and LD Capital and others back the team’s mission to bridge TradFi and DeFi with an institutional-grade derivatives platform.
The perpetual derivatives market just got a serious upgrade. PlasmaPerps by Themis Labs, a decentralized exchange born from years of quiet R&D, has emerged from stealth with an $8 million seed round by NFX, Shima Capital, LD Capital and other notable investors.
Their vision: a multi-asset perpetuals platform that gives traders permissionless access to crypto, equities, commodities, and real-world assets — all on a non-custodial, capital-efficient infrastructure built on top of Plasma Chain, which currently supports more than $7 billion in liquidity.
From DeFi Experiment to Institutional Infrastructure
Originally incubated during the 2020 DeFi summer, PlasmaPerps began as an ambitious attempt to bring leverage to Liquidity Pools. But instead of chasing hype cycles, the team chose a harder path: rebuilding from first principles.
After a strategic pause and a six-month technical overhaul, the project now returns with renewed focus — turning lessons from early missteps into the foundation of a robust, scalable derivatives protocol.
“Too many projects optimized for short-term metrics,” a core team member shared. “We optimized for product market fit.”
A Platform Built for Scale — and Substance
PlasmaPerps is no ordinary PerpDEX.
Its architecture extends beyond crypto, enabling traders to access perpetual contracts across asset classes — from BTC and ETH to stocks, metals, energy, and tokenized RWAs — all while maintaining complete on-chain custody.
The platform integrates Plasma Chain’s high-throughput liquidity rails with innovative yield farming mechanics, allowing liquidity providers to earn sustainable returns from trading fees, funding rates, and protocol-owned liquidity pools.
This combination of multi-asset exposure, capital efficiency, and yield sustainability fills a long-standing gap in the derivatives landscape — one that centralized exchanges have dominated for years.
Built by Veterans, Backed by Visionaries
The PlasmaPerps team is composed of operators who’ve built at scale:
- A technical lead who has managed engineering teams of 100+ developers at major tech firms.
- A growth strategist with experience scaling Web3 startups and user acquisition in competitive markets.
- A DeFi-native protocol architect behind several decentralized systems managing billions in total value locked.
Their collective track record of surviving market cycles and shipping through them, drew the confidence of leading crypto venture firms.
“Perpetuals Are the Railroads of DeFi”
“The derivatives market in traditional finance is worth hundreds of trillions,” the team notes.
“In crypto, we’re still in the early innings. Our mission isn’t just to build another perps platform — it’s to build the rails that allow any trader, anywhere, to access perpetual exposure to any asset class, without intermediaries or custody risk.”
That vision resonates with the current shift in DeFi: away from speculative farming and toward institutional-grade, multi-asset liquidity systems.
The Road Ahead
PlasmaPerps plans to establish itself as the dominant perpetuals exchange on Plasma Chain. The roadmap includes:
- Capital Efficiency: Optimized margin systems and liquidation mechanisms to protect traders and ensure solvency.
- Asset Diversity: Integration of equities, commodities, forex, and RWAs for true cross-asset exposure.
- Sustainable Yield: Revenue sharing from trading fees and protocol liquidity to reward long-term participants.
The team is also preparing integrations with major tokenization platforms and institutional DeFi partners to bring traditional asset classes on-chain.
A Different Kind of Comeback Story
In a market often obsessed with speed, PlasmaPerps’ re-emergence offers something rarer: discipline.
The project’s journey, from early DeFi experiment to institutional-ready exchange underscores how technical excellence, patient capital, and strategic pivots can outlast entire market cycles.
As the lines blur between traditional and decentralized finance, PlasmaPerps aims to stand at the center of that convergence, providing traders with a single, borderless platform for perpetual exposure across the world’s asset classes.
About PlasmaPerps
PlasmaPerps is a non-custodial decentralized exchange for perpetual futures across crypto, equities, commodities, and real-world assets.
Built on Plasma Chain’s $7B+ liquidity infrastructure, it combines institutional-grade trading performance with sustainable yield opportunities for liquidity providers.
Learn more: plasmaperps.com
Company Details
Organization: Plasma Perps
Contact Person Name: John Lee
Website: https://www.plasmaperps.com/
Email: [email protected]
City: Miami
State: Florida
Country: United States
