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Perennial, a decentralized finance protocol for trading derivatives, raised $12 million in a seed funding round.

Polychain Capital and Variant co-led the round, with Archetype, Coinbase Ventures, Scalar Capital, Robot Ventures and others participating, Perennial said. The project has launched its mainnet.

Perennial was co-founded by Kevin Britz and Arjun Rao. Before Perennial, the duo also co-founded Astro Wallet in 2017, which was acquired by Coinbase in 2019. Both are still working for Coinbase in an advisory capacity, Britz said.

"Perennial is a derivatives protocol that offers a super simple trading experience, a flexible and capital-efficient model for providing liquidity, and a developer primitive that makes composing DeFi derivatives easy," Britz said. The company aims to become the foundational infrastructure in the DeFi derivatives stack.

With its mainnet launch, Perennial is initially offering three markets including long-ether, short-ether and long-squeeth.

"This is just the start," Britz said. "Perennial has a packed roadmap planned out, including more tradable markets, an ecosystem buildout on L2s [Layer 2s], and mechanism design improvements."

It wasn't specified if the funding was raised via equity or token round, but Britz said the Perennial protocol doesn’t have a token at this time. The Perennial product was developed by Perennial Labs, whose parent company Equilibria was co-founded in June last year by Britz and Rao.

Britz declined to comment on Perennial's current headcount but said the project is hiring across all functions, including engineering, growth, community, and product.

DeFi-related projects have started to receive venture capital injections after a long hiatus. Earlier this week, Uniswap-based DeFi protocol Panoptic raised $4.5 million. Last month, Polkadot-based blockchain interoperability protocol t3rn raised $6.5 million, and Cosmos-based DeFi protocol Onomy raised $10 million in private token funding rounds.

The Mirror, a game development platform that lets indie developers build virtual worlds, raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by Founders Found, the Silicon Valley venture fund that has backed Stripe, Airbnb and Lyft.

Founded in Miami by CEO Jared McCluskey, the startup currently has a team of 15 people. Additional participants in the round included Konvoy Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Florida Funders and Palm Tree Crew.

The Mirror expedites the creation of 3D multiplayer games set in virtual worlds and includes tools for real-time collaboration, which is one of the characteristics necessary for occupation in the metaverse, according to Matt Ball, the author of a recent book on the subject. The startup says that it will serve developers of all skill levels, including those with no coding experience.

"The Mirror has a fundamentally different approach of using open-source software to bring real-time collaborative game development to a fragmented industry,” Founders Fund partner Keith Rabois said in a statement.

Amid bear market woes, venture funding in NFT and web3 gaming projects jumped 66% in 2022 to become one of the bright spots in an industry facing declining crypto prices and layoffs. Advancements in technology, infrastructure and throughputs on first- and second-level chains have increased the chances for successful blockchain-based games.

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