Vest Labs

While at the University of Pennsylvania, Justin MaJustin MaJustin Ma is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Vest Labs, a New York–based trading technology startup that operates Vest Markets, a perpetual futures trading and retail prop trading platform.Open the full entry became close friends and roommates with Rikuya Takatsu and Maximilian Tsiang. During their junior year in 2021, as early crypto perpetual trading platforms gained attention, the three began to study how exchanges worked, came to believe that the pricing systems used by some early decentralized trading platforms were mathematically flawed, and set out to address those problems. That year Ma dropped out; he used the proceeds from the sale of Berri, an app he had previously built, to begin high-frequency crypto trading and lay the groundwork for Vest, starting with an open-source research forum where he published papers on exchange mechanics and trade execution; the three spent months living together in a house designing algorithms to improve exchanges.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

From October 2022 to November 2023, Vest Labs, describing itself as “a quantitative crypto research firm based in New York,” published a series of research papers on topics including utility indifference pricing, optimal margin requirements, funding rates, optimal liquidations via convex optimization, virtual automated market makers (vAMM) and liquidity curves, and zkRisk.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

At a University of Pennsylvania alumni event during the Stanford Blockchain Conference in 2024, Ma met Catrina WangCatrina WangCatrina Wang is a crypto venture capitalist and a general partner at Portal Ventures, a venture firm focused on leading pre-seed rounds in blockchain projects.Open the full entry, a fellow alum and general partner at Portal VenturesPortal VenturesPortal Ventures is a US venture capital firm founded by Evan Fisher in 2022 that focuses on the pre-seed stage in blockchain and crypto, with its main strategy being to lead first checks before product-market fit; in 2026, it led the $13 million seed round of the retail proprietary trading startup Vest Labs.Open the full entry, and pitched Vest to her for the first time, beginning a conversation that ultimately led to the funding round led by Portal Ventures.⁠[1][1]

On March 11, 2025, Vest Labs announced a $5 million seed funding round from investors including Jane Street, Amber Group, Selini Capital, QCP Capital, and Big Brain Holdings, with executives from Citadel, UBS, and HRT also investing. The company then positioned itself as a quantitative research firm developing financial infrastructure for “real-time, universal risk pricing,” and launched the perpetual futures exchange Vest Exchange as its first proof of concept: it uses blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs to enforce a neutral pricing mechanism rather than relying on profit-seeking market makers; the company said that since launch its median spread and slippage had been four times lower than those of other decentralized exchanges, and it also launched a points program to reward active traders.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

In July 2026, Vest Labs closed a $13 million funding round, which it announced on October 7. The round was led by Portal Ventures, with senior executives at Citadel SecuritiesCitadel SecuritiesCitadel Securities is an American market maker founded in Chicago in 2002 by Ken Griffin and partners and headquartered in Miami, providing liquidity to institutional and retail investors across a range of financial products. It is a separate company from Citadel, the hedge fund Griffin founded in 1990.Open the full entry, BlackRockBlackRockBlackRock is a publicly traded investment management company headquartered in New York, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven others and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker BLK); its businesses include the iShares family of exchange-traded funds and the Aladdin investment and risk management platform. As of June 30, 2026, its assets under management totaled $15.3 trillion.Open the full entry, and KKR participating as individual backers; the company called it a seed round, while Portal Ventures’ website lists it as a pre-seed round led by Portal. The company did not disclose its valuation and planned to use the funds to launch a mobile app, add tradable markets, and grow its team, which then numbered 22.⁠[1][1][4][1][1][5]

According to the company, it closed the round at $10 million in annualized revenue, with $18 million raised in total; over two weeks in September its daily revenue grew from $25,000 to more than $1 million; more than 27,000 traders used the platform, most of them traditional markets traders who had never traded crypto or perpetual futures; as of late September, roughly 26% of traders had received a cash payout, and monthly active traders and volume had grown more than 300% month over month.⁠[5][5][5][1][5]

As of October 2026, Vest Markets offers 24/7 trading of perpetual futures on stocks, indices, commodities, foreign exchange, and crypto assets, with an embedded retail prop trading platform. Traders pay a one-time evaluation fee and trade on a simulated account; those who hit the 10% profit target while respecting the risk rules can receive a funded account of $2,500 to $25,000, keep up to 80% of their profits, and never lose more than the evaluation fee they paid. The company says every funded trade is placed in the real market and it never takes the other side of its traders’ positions, so it does not profit from traders’ losses; Ma has said that this means the company has no reason to make rules that work against traders.⁠[5][5][5][6][6][1][5][5]

As of October 2026, Vest’s backers included Portal Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Amber Group, Selini Capital, Auros, and Flowdesk, among others.⁠[5]

Vest Markets: Official website: https://www.vestmarkets.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

Vest Labs: Research website: https://www.vest.xyz/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/VestLabs (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

X: Vest Markets public account: https://x.com/vestexchange (opens in a new window)⁠[6]