Author | Asher(@Asher_ 0210)
A funding announcement has made the Perp DEX Variational the hottest topic in the airdrop hunting community.
Last night, Variational announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto and Coinbase Ventures. Following the news, Variational's pre-market price surged over 36% in a short period, once touching $6.9 (corresponding to an FDV of $690 million), and has since retraced, currently quoted at $6.1 (corresponding to an FDV of $610 million).
Variational Pre-market Price Movement
Furthermore, the probability of the event "Variational's FDV exceeds $500 million one day after listing" on the prediction platform predict.fun has risen to 57%; the probability for "Variational's FDV exceeds $1 billion one day after listing" has risen to 27%.
"Variational FDV After One Day of Listing" Prediction Event on predict.fun
Next, Odaily Planet Daily takes you to understand Variational, the rules for trading to earn points, and when the TGE will occur.
Variational: A Zero-Fee Perp DEX Deployed on Arbitrum
Variational is a Perp DEX platform deployed on Arbitrum, with its company headquartered in the Cayman Islands. Its core product is Omni. Simply put, users can trade perpetual contracts for mainstream crypto assets like BTC, ETH, and SOL on Variational, as well as long-tail assets, stocks, commodities, volatility indices, and more types of markets.
Compared to most Perp DEXs, the most intuitive feature of Variational is its zero trading fees. When trading on Omni, the platform does not charge regular transaction fees; the main costs come from spreads, slippage, funding rates, and deposit/withdrawal fees.
Additionally, the underlying design of Variational differs from traditional Perp DEXs. It does not rely solely on internal platform matching or a single liquidity pool to handle trades. Instead, it operates on a "brokerage-like" model connecting to multi-source liquidity, including traditional financial market makers, crypto-native market makers, and major trading platforms, aiming to solve the "cold start liquidity" problem in on-chain markets.
According to DefiLlama data, Variational's trading volume over the past month has exceeded $16 billion, with current open interest exceeding $800 million, ranking fourth in the Perp DEX sector. Notably, among the top five Perp DEXs by open interest, Variational is the only one that has not yet issued a token.
Open Interest Ranking for Perp DEXs
Trading to Earn Points: Detailed Rules for Variational
For regular users, the most direct way to participate in Variational currently is still trading to earn points.
Variational officially launched the Omni Points Program on December 17, 2025, and issued a one-time retrospective airdrop of 3 million points to historical trading users at launch, covering activity up to December 11, 2025. Since then, points are distributed every Friday at 00:00 UTC, counting platform activity from the previous cycle ending at 00:00 UTC on Thursday.
Furthermore, according to the documentation, the project promises that approximately 50% of the token supply will be allocated to the community (through various mechanisms like points, revenue sharing, not just a single airdrop), with plans to use at least 30% of protocol revenue for VAR token buybacks and burns.
The core of Variational's points system is not complex: the more active the trading, the more opportunities to earn points. However, Variational does not simply distribute based on trading volume; it incorporates designs that favor trading quality, specifically including:
- Points are directly related to user trading activity: The platform rewards page indicates that the points program is designed to reward protocol users, who can earn points through platform activity. The official team reserves the right to adjust points and handle inorganic behavior, meaning that obvious meaningless volume trading or arbitrage-like point farming may be penalized or excluded later;
- Extra bonus for early users: Accounts that traded before the points program launch enjoy a 10% points boost for points earned subsequently;
- Introduction of the Reward Tiers system: A user's total trading volume over the past 30 days affects their tier, calculated as personal volume plus 0.2 times the volume from invited users. Different tiers correspond to different point multipliers: Iron at 0%, Bronze at 0.5%, Silver at 1%, Gold at 2%, Platinum at 3%, Diamond at 4%, Infinity at 5%. Among them, Bronze requires a past 30-day Total Volume of $1 million, Silver $5 million, Gold $25 million, Platinum $100 million, Diamond $750 million, Infinity $2.5 billion;
- Inviting others also brings points and USDC rewards: Inviters receive 5% of the spreads paid by their invitees as USDC rewards. Additionally, every time an invitee earns 10 points, the inviter receives 1 point.
Judging from the rules, Variational's points design leans more towards organic trading rather than pure volume farming. For airdrop hunters, the focus isn't just on completing a single trade, but also on considering whether their trading frequency, capital efficiency, position risk, and point acquisition costs are well-matched.
When Will Variational Conduct Its TGE?
Currently, Variational has not announced a specific TGE date for VAR. However, based on information disclosed in the official documentation, points distribution will continue at least until the end of Q3 2026. Therefore, the community generally expects the TGE to occur in Q3 to Q4 of this year.
Data Source: Variational Official Documentation
Additionally, prediction market pricing leans more towards Q4. Polymarket data shows the probability of the event "Variational will launch its token before September 30th this year" is only 26%, while the probability for "Variational will launch its token before December 31st this year" is 78%.
"When Will Variational TGE" Prediction Event on Polymarket
