Background

Virtual Labs was founded by José Betancourt in his dorm at Yale University. The original idea was a protocol for self-verified data called Ontropy. Ontropy was a self-verified oracle that would enable users themselves to verify price data for trading and randomness for gaming. Ontropy was accepted into Binance Labs' Season 5 Incubator in October of 2022.

On April 20th, 2023 Virtual Labs closed its pre-seed round and pivoted to the idea of self-verified transactions, utilizing the existing architecture of the self-verified data protocol. Nine months later, Virtual Rollup V1 (henceforth VR1.0) was created and brought into the world with an initial cohort of a dozen gaming projects.

VR1.0 worked perfectly in theory, eliminating latency, gas fees, and wallet frictions and allowing the user to forget the game was decentralized. Demand for seamless UX was also proven, with over 25 orders for VR1.0. However, the vast majority of these orders could not be completed because integrating DApps to work with VR1.0 essentially required recoding the applications from the ground up.

Armed with this feedback, the Virtual team created VR1.1 which can support orderbook transactions as opposed to game moves, and VR1.2, which offers full chain abstraction. These updates did not make Virtual Rollup universally scalable for all blockchain transactions, but enabled support for all perpetual exchanges due to the lack of technical variety between orderbook designs.

To demonstrate VR1.2, Virtual Labs built VDEX. VDEX will be the first perpDEX with no slippage, full-self-custody, and will even be able to accept volatile assets as collateral, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Virtual Labs now employs 17 engineers and business developers across 6 countries.