GameFi Perps Platform LEVANA raises $16 Million

Elan Neiger
3 min readJun 25, 2022

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Rounds led by Dragonfly, Delphi Digital, Animoca Brands, Coinfund, Tribe Capital, Arrington and Do Kwon

Key Points

  • Levana (Leverage Any Asset) is a collection of DeFi dapps and GameFi products designed to bring a massive audience from Web2 to Web3 and the Terra ecosystem
  • Levana’s flagship protocol is a Perpetual Swap platform enabling the creation of leverage exposure for any asset, long or short, via a non-custodial, open-source, transparent and community-governed DeFi application
  • Levana Dragons, their gamified NFT collection, boasts the most unique wallet holders, highest trading volumes and largest collection of NFTs on Terra
  • Levana’s active series of P2E minigames are advancing to a larger game in the style of Axie Infinity and DeFi Kingdoms, and will include integration with their NFT collection, set to be released later this year

Tel Aviv, April 2022 — Levana, short for Leverage Any Asset, is a collection of DeFi dapps and GameFi products designed to bring a massive audience from Web2 to the Terra ecosystem. The team includes Jonathan Caras, a member of the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) and former head of Biz Dev at Starkware.

Levana’s thesis centers on the concept of DeFitainment, the blending of entertainment and DeFi. This posits that gamification and fun will bring the next generation of participants to DeFi, by engaging an audience through storytelling, entertainment and adventure. To this end, Levana has released a series of lore, minigames and experiences leading up to the release of a larger game in the style of Axie Infinity or DeFi Kingdoms, scheduled to be released in late 2022. That broader game will include integration with their successful NFT project.

Levana’s leverage trading protocols are bringing enhanced opportunities to Terra’s DeFi ecosystem.The protocol is launching with a Perpetual Swaps platform along with Levana Leveraged Index tokens (LLIs), an easy way to hold 2x leveraged positions on various cryptocurrencies. The first LLI set for release is Luna2x, a simple way to hold a 2x leveraged position of Luna, Terra’s native token.

Levana’s flagship protocol is a Perpetual Swap platform, which enables the creation of leverage exposure for any asset, with long or short positions, via a non-custodial, open-source, transparent, algorithmic and community-governed dapp.

“The derivatives market is an order of magnitude larger than the spot market in traditional finance. It is expected that perpetual markets will significantly overshadow spot markets like AMMs in the DeFi space,” says Jonathan Caras, head of Communications at Levana.

The protocol’s focus on innovation and creativity has led to a number of milestones and firsts: Levana’s initial NFT mint remains the largest on Terra to date, raising 4$ million. In addition, Levana’s gamified NFT collection boasts the largest number of unique wallet holders, the highest number of NFTs, and amongst the highest trading volumes on Terra. Levana also released the first Terra TestNet game, and the first Terra blockchain multiplayer game, as part of their gamified path to token launch and airdrop

Levana’s team also pioneered a new standard of smart contracts for their NFTs, developing the first evolving NFTs on Terra that change based on holder actions.

Levana’s connections with Terra go to the roots; the protocol was incubated by Delphi Labs in the same cohort as Astroport and Mars, two of the pillars of Terra’s burgeoning DeFi ecosystem. Levana’s connections to other DeFi protocols on Terra are revealed in their roadmap, which includes LLI’s of many Terra based tokens, as well as leveraged baskets by Nebula, and crypto bluechips Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Levana’s next generation DeFi gaming experience stands in contrast to Axie Infinity or DeFi Kingdoms, two successful examples of GameFi, by swapping their core technology of Automated Market Maker (AMM), with a more flexible platform of Perpetual Swaps, as the engine of action and trade.

By creating a platform of leveraged products utilizing the decentralized stablecoin UST, Levana is primed to tackle the problem of capital inefficiency in the derivatives market.

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Elan Neiger

A crypto and blockchain addict and nearly full time podcast listener