Avantis Labs is relevant to the AI agent ecosystem because it provides the high-leverage, programmatic financial primitives that autonomous trading agents require. As AI agents move from simple information retrieval to executing complex on-chain strategies, they need access to liquidity and derivatives that are accessible via API and built on low-latency infrastructure like Base.
Avantis specifically enables these agents to interact with a diverse set of assets, including commodities and forex, through a single decentralized protocol. By offering up to 100x leverage and a sophisticated market-making engine, Avantis serves as a foundational layer for developers building autonomous financial agents that require more than just basic spot trading capabilities. The protocol's emphasis on composability makes it a prime candidate for integration into agentic workflows that manage decentralized portfolios or hedge risk across varied asset classes.
Avantis Labs is a financial technology company building a decentralized derivatives protocol designed to bring the scale of centralized exchanges to the blockchain. Founded in 2023 by Sehaj Singh and his co-founder Brank, the company operates out of New York City. The core product, Avantis, is a perpetual trading and market-making platform that allows users to trade both cryptocurrencies and real-world assets (RWAs) with up to 100x leverage.
The technical architecture of Avantis is built on the premise that on-chain trading should not be limited to high-market-cap tokens. By utilizing data oracles, the protocol enables price discovery and trading for traditional financial instruments including forex and commodities. This focus on RWAs puts Avantis in a distinct category from most DeFi protocols, which generally restrict themselves to the crypto-native ecosystem. The platform aims to capture the volume of traders who are currently tethered to centralized entities for forex and commodities exposure but desire the self-custody and transparency of decentralized finance.
One of the defining features of the Avantis protocol is its approach to liquidity. In many decentralized exchanges, liquidity providers (LPs) take on simple positions with relatively linear risk. Avantis introduces a more nuanced LP side, described by the founders as more complex and capital-efficient than previous generations of DeFi derivatives. This infrastructure is designed to facilitate market-making that can scale without the bottlenecks found in traditional automated market maker (AMM) designs.
The company raised $4 million in a seed round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Founders Fund and Coinbase, followed by a Series A that brought total funding to $16 million. This capital has been deployed to build out their flagship protocol on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2. The choice of Base is strategic, providing the low transaction costs and high throughput required for high-frequency perpetual trading while maintaining a connection to the broader Ethereum ecosystem.
Avantis enters a crowded market of on-chain perpetual platforms. Heavyweights like dYdX and GMX have established significant liquidity moats, but they are often criticized for high fees or limited asset support. Avantis seeks to disrupt this by offering higher leverage limits and a broader range of tradable assets. The company ranks among the top-funded startups in the decentralized trading space, competing with 66 active players in the sector.
The broader vision for Avantis involves creating a composable financial layer where other protocols can build atop their market-making engine. This composability is a central theme in their development strategy, allowing for a more interconnected DeFi stack where leverage and RWAs are accessible to other decentralized applications. As the industry moves toward more professionalized on-chain trading tools, Avantis is positioned as a provider of the necessary infrastructure for institutional-grade derivatives.
An on-chain perpetual-trading and market-making protocol for crypto and real-world assets.
Avantis Labs is hiring.