Vertex Protocol
Funded to trade FX on Terra, it became an Arbitrum perps DEX instead
A decentralized exchange combining an order book with an automated market maker for spot, perpetual futures and lending on Arbitrum and other EVM chains.
- Capital raised (announced)
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2022 |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Darius Tabai | — | Not established | Oct 2026 | |
| Alwin Peng | — | Not established | Oct 2026 |
Timeline
26 April 2022
The company said the money would scale the protocol ahead of a mainnet launch planned for summer 2022, after a testnet it said drew more than 75,000 users.
2023
The exchange went live on Arbitrum in 2023, offering spot, perpetuals and money markets.
November 2023
8 July 2025
14 August 2025
Per the company: withdrawals first, then reduce-only trading, then forced settlement of open positions.
How it ended
Acquired
Vertex agreed to hand its team and trading infrastructure to the Ink Foundation, which stewards the Kraken-incubated Ink layer-2, on undisclosed terms. It stopped trading on all its existing deployments in a staged shutdown and sunset its VRTX token, offering holders an allocation of 1% of the future INK supply; treasury and unvested tokens were to be burned.
What happened next
- Aftermath20 November 2025
blocmates described Nado, an order-book exchange on Ink from the Kraken side, as born from the talent acquisition deal with Vertex and inheriting its technology and team. It launched under a new name, not as Vertex.
Still alive
Open spot
Vertex Protocol is gone. Is your derivatives exchange still running?
Spotlight your project here.
Sources
7 sources behind this page.
- 1Nado: The Smarter Way to Trade Spot, Margin, Perps · blocmates · Mar 2026
- 2VRTX price slides 40% as Vertex Protocol phases out native token, abandons Arbitrum · Invezz · Jul 2025
- 3Vertex Shutdown? Paradex Steps In · Parallel Research (Substack newsletter) · Jul 2025
- 4Vertex (VRTX) - Shutdown Sequence - 08 Jul to 14 Aug 2025 · TradingView (CoinMarketCal event listing quoting a Vertex post on X) · Jul 2025 · user-editable
- 5Vertex Protocol locks in $8.5m seed · Venture Capital Journal · Apr 2022
- 6Vertex Protocol Team to Join Ink Foundation, Build New DeFi Primitives on Ink Layer-2 · Vertex (company press release via PR Newswire) · Jul 2025
- 7Vertex Protocol, a Decentralized FX Trading Platform, Closes $8.5 Million Seed Round · Vertex Protocol (company press release via PRWeb) · Apr 2022
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.