Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund returns to the cryptocurrency market, leads $9 million strategic round in Maverick Protocol

Original source: Maverick Protocol
After many years, Founders Fund owned by Peter Thiel, the founder of Paypal and angel investor of ChatGPT and Facebook, returned to the cryptocurrency market and led a $9 million strategic round in Maverick Protocol, a leading DeFi infrastructure provider, making Maverick the first project of its return.
On June 21, 2023, Maverick Protocol, a leading AMM provider in DeFi, completed a strategic round of financing worth $9 million to build a more efficient DeFi infrastructure. The round was led by Founders Fund, with participation from Pantera Capital, Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, and Apollo Crypto.
What is Maverick Protocol?
Maverick Protocol is a decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure that aims to bring higher market efficiency to the entire DeFi industry.
In March 2023, Maverick Protocol launched its DEX product on the Ethereum mainnet, using its pioneering dynamically distributed AMM as the technical core, providing liquidity providers (LPs) with tools to achieve higher capital efficiency. Since its launch, according to DeFillama data, the protocol has once ranked in the top 3 Ethereum and the No. 1 DEX in the zkSync Era by trading volume, achieving up to 374% active capital or "capital efficiency". At the same time, Maverick has also integrated with leading LST projects such as Lido, Frax, Liquity, cbETH, Rocket Pool and Swell, and quickly dominated the LST AMM market with a market share of more than 35% of the entire LST market trading volume.
Just two months after its launch, the platform quickly launched 'Boosted Positions (BP)', a set of "surgical" precise and efficient liquidity incentive tools, which provides Token projects and DAO treasuries with a more precise means of controlling liquidity, greatly reducing the waste of rewards and maximizing the efficiency of incentivizing liquidity. Currently, LST-Fi projects including Rocket Pool, Frax, Swell, Gravita, etc. have started using Maverick BP to incentivize community liquidity.
"We founded Maverick to provide the critical market infrastructure needed to eliminate DeFi inefficiencies and help the industry grow to new heights," said Alvin Xu, founding member of the Maverick Protocol. "In a short period of time, we have delivered consistently strong levels of capital efficiency for liquidity providers and equipped token projects with new incentive tools that use extremely precise incentive tools to "sculpt liquidity." This financing enables us to continue moving forward on our mission to build a stronger and more efficient DeFi ecosystem for everyone."
Founders Fund
Founders Fund is a venture capital fund with $11 billion in assets under management, and its portfolio includes Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify, Stripe, and Oscar Health. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Palantir Technologies, and was one of the earliest investors in Facebook. The firm's partners, including Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Brian Singerman, were founders, early employees, and investors in companies such as PayPal, Google, Palantir Technologies, and SpaceX.
"Maverick has quickly established itself as an industry leader, providing LST liquidity providers with the potential to achieve greater capital efficiency while becoming the LST Token trading hub," said Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund. "The project's surgical approach to DeFi will drive the development of the entire industry."
The strategic significance of Maverick’s financing
This round of strategic financing will help Maverick further expand its ecosystem. The project will focus on building a more efficient Liquid Staking Token (LST) infrastructure and solving the problem of low cross-chain liquidity. The new funds will also be used to scale the protocol to deploy on new chains, support ecosystem developers to build on its infrastructure, and attract more projects to join its growing ecosystem.
Previously, Maverick completed a seed round of financing in 2021 and a strategic round of financing in 2022. Previous investors in the project include Pantera, Jump, Circle Ventures and Gemini.
Maverick Protocol has announced its Token launch plan. Its Token MAV is mainly used for voting on community governance and platform incentives, and plays a vital role in its next strategic layout of LST-FI. At the same time, MAV is also in the Binance LaunchPool staking plan, and users can stake TUSD and BNB to win MAV rewards.