Exchange startup Liquid raises $18 million Series A for leveraged trading on stocks, crypto, commodities, prediction markets, and private secondaries

```json { "title": "Liquid Raises $18M Series A for Leveraged Trading on Stocks, Crypto, and Prediction Markets", "metaDescription": "NYC fintech startup Liquid closes an $18 million Series A less than six months after its $7.6M seed round, expanding into stocks, commodities, and prediction markets.", "content": "<h2>Liquid Raises $18 Million Series A to Expand Leveraged Trading Across Asset Classes</h2><p>New York City-based fintech startup Liquid has closed an $18 million Series A funding round, Fortune reported on April 28, 2026 — less than six months after the company raised a $7.6 million seed round led by Paradigm. The fresh capital is set to support an expansion of Liquid's leveraged trading platform beyond crypto perpetual futures into stocks, commodities, prediction markets, and private secondaries, positioning the company as a broad-based, non-custodial trading application for retail investors.</p><p>The rapid follow-on raise underscores both investor appetite for decentralized trading infrastructure and the swiftly evolving market for leveraged, on-chain financial products. Liquid was founded in March 2025 by Franklyn Wang, a Harvard-educated former quantitative researcher at Two Sigma, alongside a team with backgrounds at Citadel and D.E. Shaw.</p><h2>From Perp DEX Aggregator to Multi-Asset Trading Platform</h2><p>Liquid launched as a decentralized perpetual futures (perp) DEX aggregator, combining multiple on-chain trading venues — including Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Ostium — into a single non-custodial, mobile-first application available on iOS and Android. The platform charges a small incremental fee on top of native exchange fees and also offers yield vaults and real-time analytics. According to Dealroom, the app supports leverage of up to 40x while maintaining a non-custodial architecture, meaning users retain control of their own private keys at all times.</p><p>With the Series A, Liquid is expanding its scope significantly. According to Fortune's reporting, the platform will now support leveraged trading on stocks, crypto, commodities, prediction markets, and private secondaries — a breadth of asset coverage that few retail-facing platforms currently offer in a unified, decentralized interface.</p><p>Liquid's traction to date has been notable for an early-stage startup. According to figures cited by The Block and Ventureburn, the platform processed over $500 million in trading volume within weeks of launch. An updated profile on Dealroom places cumulative trading volume at over $600 million.</p><h2>A Seed Round That Closed in Five Days</h2><p>Liquid's $7.6 million seed round, announced in November 2025, was structured as equity and closed within five days in March 2025, according to The Block, citing founder Franklyn Wang. Paradigm led the round, with General Catalyst, Alpen, and K5 Global also participating. Angel investors included Ashwin Ramachandran, co-founder of Nova Fund | BH Digital; Eric Wu, co-founder of Opendoor; Vlad Novakovski, founder of Lighter; and crypto trader smartestmoney.hl.</p><p>The speed of that close — and the caliber of the institutional backers — reflected the momentum in on-chain derivatives markets at the time. According to The Block's Data Dashboard, perp DEXes hit a record cumulative monthly trading volume of nearly $1.2 trillion around the time of Liquid's seed announcement in November 2025.</p><p>At the time of the seed raise, Liquid's core team of approximately ten people was based in New York City and was, according to The Block, aggressively hiring across engineering, marketing, and design.</p><h2>The Market Behind the Momentum: Perps and Prediction Markets</h2><p>The broader trading landscape Liquid is operating in has seen extraordinary growth. According to data from CryptoQuant cited by CNBC, perpetual futures trading volume climbed to a nominal $61.7 trillion in 2025 — a 29% increase from 2024. CoinGecko data, also cited by CNBC, shows that perps now account for more than 70% of all volume on centralized crypto exchanges. These figures illustrate why infrastructure plays in the perp DEX space have attracted serious venture backing.</p><p>Liquid's expansion into prediction markets is equally well-timed. According to figures from Nasdaq and The Motley Fool published in February 2026, nearly $6 billion in prediction market contracts are now traded on a weekly basis across platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket. The category has also attracted major platform players: Robinhood's prediction markets hub, launched through a partnership with Kalshi, became the platform's fastest-ever growing product line by revenue in 2025, with 11 billion contracts traded by more than one million customers, according to Robinhood's own figures cited by CNBC.</p><p>That mainstream validation — from platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase building out prediction market products — signals growing retail appetite for instruments that allow users to take leveraged positions on outcomes beyond traditional asset prices. Liquid's non-custodial, multi-asset approach positions it as a decentralized alternative to these centralized incumbents.</p><h2>The Philosophy Behind the Product</h2><p>Wang has been direct about what Liquid is trying to accomplish. In the platform's product documentation, he outlined the core rationale: <em>"If you believe in something, you should make money for being right. Furthermore, you should be able to make more money for being more confident in your prediction, without risking additional dollars."</em></p><p>That philosophy extends to how the platform thinks about access and fairness in financial markets. Speaking to Ventureburn, Wang said: <em>"Retail traders should have the same access to data, risk control, and automation that large firms do."</em></p><p>On the question of custody — a persistent concern in decentralized finance following high-profile exchange failures — Wang has been unequivocal: <em>"Our users hold their own keys. That will never change."</em></p><h2>What Comes Next for Liquid</h2><p>With $18 million in Series A capital now secured, Liquid's stated direction is to build out leveraged trading across a wider range of asset classes: stocks, crypto, commodities, prediction markets, and private secondaries. This represents a meaningful evolution from a crypto-native perp aggregator toward something closer to a comprehensive, non-custodial financial superapp for active retail traders.</p><p>The company has not publicly disclosed the lead investor in the Series A or the full list of participants at this stage, beyond what Fortune's April 28, 2026 report has confirmed. Given the participation of firms like Paradigm and General Catalyst at seed, the institutional interest in the space is clear — but the specifics of the new round's cap table have not been verified in the research available at time of publication.</p><p>What is verifiable is the pace: from founding in March 2025 to a seed close in five days, to $500 million-plus in trading volume within weeks of launch, to a Series A less than six months after the seed — Liquid has moved quickly even by fintech startup standards. Whether the platform can maintain that velocity as it navigates the regulatory and technical complexity of adding stocks, commodities, and private secondaries to its product suite remains to be seen.</p><p>The prediction markets category, in particular, is still defining its regulatory boundaries in the United States, and the integration of private secondaries into a leveraged, decentralized trading environment introduces layers of compliance and liquidity questions that the company will need to address as it scales.</p><p>For now, the combination of a strong founding team, proven institutional backers, and a market riding record trading volumes has given Liquid a credible runway to find out.</p><p>For more tech news, visit our <a href=\"/news\">news section</a>.</p><h2>Why This Matters for Productivity-Minded Investors</h2><p>Platforms like Liquid represent a broader shift in how individuals can interact with financial markets — putting sophisticated tools for risk management, leverage, and multi-asset exposure into a mobile-first, self-custodied interface. For professionals focused on personal optimization, understanding where fintech infrastructure is heading is part of staying financially informed and strategically positioned. <a href=\"/#waitlist\">Join the Moccet waitlist to stay ahead of the curve.</a></p>", "excerpt": "New York City fintech startup Liquid has raised an $18 million Series A less than six months after its $7.6 million seed round led by Paradigm, with the new capital set to expand its non-custodial trading platform into stocks, commodities, prediction markets, and private secondaries. Founded in March 2025 by former Two Sigma quant researcher Franklyn Wang, Liquid launched as a decentralized perpetual futures aggregator and has facilitated over $600 million in cumulative trading volume. The raise comes as perpetual futures trading volume hit $61.7 trillion in 2025 and prediction markets approach $6 billion in weekly contract volume.", "keywords": ["Liquid fintech Series A", "leveraged trading platform", "perp DEX aggregator", "prediction markets crypto", "Franklyn Wang Liquid"], "slug": "liquid-raises-18-million-series-a-leveraged-trading-stocks-crypto-prediction-markets" } ```