Not only contract trading, Liquid aims to incorporate Pre-IPO and prediction markets into one App.

Written by: Nicky, Foresight News

On April 28, the multi-asset leveraged trading platform Liquid announced the completion of a new financing round of $18 million. This round was co-led by investment institutions Neo and Left Lane Capital, with participation from several other institutions including Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel, and Paradigm.

This financing comes less than six months after the previous round. In November 2025, Liquid completed a seed round of $7.6 million led by Paradigm, which also included General Catalyst and several angel investors.

Combining both funding rounds, Liquid's total financing amount has exceeded $25.6 million. Liquid stated that the new funds will primarily be used to accelerate product iteration, expand asset coverage, and further drive user growth.

The two lead investors in this round each have their unique characteristics, reflecting the market's betting logic for such products at different stages of development.

Neo is an early-stage investment institution based in San Francisco, known for its founder-first investment style, having invested in over 260 companies since 2017. In the Web3 domain, Neo has a broad layout, with signature cases including the compliant prediction market platform Kalshi, as well as Ethereum Layer 2 infrastructure Caldera.

Left Lane Capital, on the other hand, is a growth equity fund based in New York, managing about $2.5 billion in assets, and is not purely a crypto-native institution. Its investments in the Web3 field focus more on stablecoin infrastructure and crypto retail applications, with representative cases including the stablecoin payment platform KAST.

Platform Positioning and Core Functions

Liquid's positioning is a one-stop non-custodial leveraged trading platform, primarily targeting the new generation of retail traders.

Its core feature is breaking the time limitations of traditional financial markets, providing year-round round-the-clock trading services. Users do not need to switch between different platforms; they can access over 500 markets through a single interface. The tradable asset categories encompass multiple fields, including cryptocurrencies, US stocks and international stocks, commodities, foreign exchange currency pairs, Pre-IPO company equity, and prediction markets.

In terms of leveraged support, the platform offers differentiated leverage multiples based on different asset types, with a maximum leverage of up to 200 times. The iOS, Android, and web versions are now fully online, and users can register via email or crypto wallets, funding their accounts using Apple Pay, PayPal, bank transfers, or crypto deposits.

Since its launch around August 2025, Liquid has reached a cumulative trading volume exceeding $3 billion, with approximately 35,000 to 40,000 registered users.

Team Background

The founding team of Liquid exhibits distinct quantitative and technology-driven characteristics.

The company's CEO and co-founder Franklyn Wang graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor’s in Mathematics and a Master’s in Computer Science, focusing on theoretical computer science, machine learning, and microeconomics during his studies. Before founding Liquid in 2025, he worked as a quantitative researcher at the quant hedge fund Two Sigma Investments, focusing on the development of systematic macro strategies and trading system construction.

Co-founder Finn Hulse has limited public information available, mainly appearing on the founding team list. Additionally, the company has several founding engineers and product engineers, with a streamlined overall team size currently around ten people, primarily located in New York, and still actively recruiting for positions in engineering, marketing, and design.

Point Incentive Program

Liquid has not yet disclosed any token issuance plans, but has launched a point incentive system to reward early active users. This point program entered its first season in November 2025, allocating 100,000 points to users each week.

The ways to earn points include executing perpetual contract trades, maintaining deposits on the platform, inviting new users, and using new platform features. The platform employs a proprietary formula with undisclosed weights to allocate points based on various contribution factors from users. According to community members, the current cost of 1 point is about $0.4 - $1.

The first season is still ongoing, with the official end date not yet announced, nor is there clear information regarding point redemption or token mapping.

Competitive Landscape

The competition in the decentralized perpetual contract track that Liquid operates in is quite fierce, with several mature protocols already establishing significant scale advantages.

Hyperliquid, which uses an order book model, is one of the most dominant projects in the current track. It is community-driven, has not received external venture capital, and has self-launched through large-scale token airdrops, now with over 1.93 million registered users. According to DeFiLlama data, Hyperliquid's TVL (Total Value Locked) is approximately $4.75 billion, with a 24-hour trading volume of about $6 billion. According to CoinMarketCap data, its token HYPE has a current market cap of about $1.03 billion and an FDV of about $3.89 billion.

The high-leverage and multi-asset-focused Aster supports up to 1000 times leverage and has covered various asset types, including stock perpetual contracts, with over 15 million registered users. According to DeFiLlama data, Aster's TVL is approximately $916 million, with a 24-hour trading volume of about $1.3 billion. According to CoinMarketCap data, its token ASTER has a current market cap of about $1.71 billion and an FDV of about $5.29 billion.

Liquid's differentiated path lies in its aggregator positioning. The platform integrates liquidity from multiple decentralized exchanges while incorporating perpetual contracts of traditional asset categories such as stocks, commodities, and foreign exchange into its trading system, providing a near centralized exchange experience while ensuring non-custodial asset management for users.

However, based on the current trading volume and user scale, Liquid still shows a magnitude gap compared to the top projects mentioned above. In this fiercely competitive track, its subsequent development will remain to be closely observed.