Core Contributors

Founders

Variational was co-founded by Lucas Schuermann and Edward Yu. Lucas and Edward met as engineering students and researchers at Columbia University, before founding their own hedge fund called Qu Capital in 2017. In 2019, after raising multiple rounds of capital for the fund, Qu Capital was acquired by Digital Currency Group (Genesis), and Lucas and Edward became the VP of Engineering and VP of Quant Trading (respectively) at Genesis Trading.

In 2021, after processing hundreds of billions in volume at Genesis (at the time one of the largest desks in crypto), Lucas and Edward left to start their own proprietary trading firm named Variational. After raising $10M in funding to profitably run their trading strategies for a few years, and integrating with virtually every CEX and DEX in the space, Lucas and Edward decided to use the trading profits from Variational's market making to develop the Variational Protocol. Lucas and Edward's goal with the Variational Protocol is to open their strategies up to retail traders with Omni, solving the problem of leaking profits to external market makers, and solve pain points they saw firsthand by bringing institutional OTC trading on-chain with Pro.

Development and Quant Teams

The Variational development and quant teams consist of industry veterans active in crypto algorithmic trading since 2017 with prior experience at Google, Meta (Facebook), Goldman Sachs, GSR, and more. All members of the core technical team each have more than a decade each of experience in software engineering or quantiative research.