Some of crypto’s most lucrative businesses have always been its exchanges, but crypto-based exchanges are coming to be less reliant on crypto trading. Liquid, which launched as a hub for crypto-based derivatives in 2025, closed an $18 million Series A round on the premise of being a 24/7 leveraged trading hub for retail traders of all stripes.
Less than six months after raising $7.6 million in a seed round led by the crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, Liquid’s latest round was co-led by Neo and Left Lane Capital. Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel, AntiFund, and Sunflower Capital also joined the round.
Liquid was founded by Franklyn Wang, a 25-year-old Harvard graduate who worked as a quantitative researcher at the quant trading firm Two Sigma before leaving to start a crypto exchange. The app began as an aggregator for perpetual futures, a form of derivative popular among crypto traders.
Liquid has since expanded into a number of other asset classes, and the fresh funding comes as crypto apps across the board find themselves expanding into non-crypto sectors. The most popular markets on blockchain-based Polymarket mainly involve geopolitics and sports, and traders are using crypto derivatives exchange Hyperliquid to trade commodities on the weekend.
In a similar manner, Liquid aspires to be more than a hub for exchanging crypto.
This expanded vision comes at a time when trading patterns in traditional assets like large cap stocks and oil are beginning to resemble those of risk assets. That is leading dedicated retail traders to seek multiple asset classes in the same trading interface, says Marc Bhargava, managing director at Liquid investor General Catalyst.
“The crypto degen or the day trader or the commodities junkie, all these people are chasing the same dopamine hit of doing well and having an edge on the market,” Bhargava said in an interview.
The Liquid app aims to create a simplified trading interface for an exhaustive list of financial assets. Users can already trade stocks, crypto, foreign currencies, Polymarket positions, and pre-IPO company secondaries—with up to 200x leverage in some jurisdictions.
Retail asset exchanges are already a crowded space. Crypto apps like Coinbase have begun to diversify into non-crypto assets, and more traditional retail finance apps like Robinhood have begun to dip their toes into areas like tokenized stocks. For Bhargava, Liquid’s edge could be in the fact that it’s being built as a general purpose exchange for leveraged trading on a number of asset classes, rather than focusing on a specific vertical.
“All the A/B studies you do on your own products are catered to your existing users,” Bhargava said. “So if you’re a prediction markets app and now you’re talking about going into equities or secondaries or crypto, it’s very hard, because your product team, your engineering team and your customer base is kind of situated in being more of a certain type.”
