Lucas Schuermann – Swapping Out Perpetual Futures (S7E34)

About this episode

My guest in this episode is Lucas Schuermann, co-founder of Variational, which seeks to bring the trillion-dollar OTC derivatives market on chain. This is my second episode on Variational. A little over a year ago I spoke with Lucas's co-founder, Edward Yu. In that time, the mission hasn't changed, but a lot else has. We begin with a re-introduction to the business and its retail-facing platform, Omni. Unlike a central limit order book, where a crowd of competing market makers quote against unknown flow, every trade on Omni is quoted by a single, internal liquidity provider — OLP — through a request-for-quote model that segregates flow. Because OLP knows who it's trading with, it can price retail flow as non-toxic: netting offsetting positions against each other, warehousing what it chooses to keep, and hedging only the residual risk externally. It's a model that let Variational list a long tail of crypto-native assets at competitive spreads, even where on-platform open interest remained thin. The surge in demand for real-world asset exposure on chain has pushed that model in two directions. The first is widening where those hedges can go. Rather than trying to rebuild forty y