No.217
Avantis AVNT
Base's leverage desk
🎭 a sharp-suited broker, calm at the desk, happy to put leverage on crypto, gold, or a currency, and paid only when you win
💬 “Pull up a chair. I don't own a blockchain, I rent a desk on Base and open it to anyone. Want leverage on Bitcoin, on the euro, on gold? Same desk. And here's my one rule: I only take a cut when you walk away with a profit.”
- What it is: a perpetuals exchange where you can trade with borrowed size (leverage) without a company in the middle.
- Where it lives: it is an app on Base, Coinbase's Layer 2. Avantis has no chain of its own.
- Its trick: 'zero-fee perpetuals', you only pay a trading fee when a trade ends in profit.
- The token: AVNT is a capped 1 billion supply token used for voting and staking, not money you spend.
📖 The Story
In mid-2023, a small team that had passed through Pantera Capital, Lazard, and McKinsey, led by Harsehaj Singh and Raymond Dong, started building a trading venue with no building. No company would hold your money, no clerk would match your order. It would all run as code on Base's rails, the Ethereum Layer 2 run by Coinbase.
The product opened to traders in February 2024. The pitch was plain: come bet on which way a price will move, borrow size to make the bet bigger, and do it on crypto or on real-world things like currencies and commodities, side by side. Most exchanges keep those two worlds apart. Avantis put them on the same desk.
What made people talk was the fee. On most venues you pay to open a trade win or lose. Avantis flipped that into 'zero-fee perpetuals', where the trading fee only lands when you close in profit. Backed by Pantera, Founders Fund, and the Base ecosystem, it grew into the busiest exchange on Base by volume. The AVNT token arrived later, in 2025, to hand the desk's decisions over to the people who use it.
📊 Stats
These are our editorial ratings, a quick read of the coin's character, not market data.
🧩 How it works
Avantis is a DeFi app made of smart contracts on Base. The engine has two sides. People who want steady yield deposit a stablecoin called USDC into shared vaults, that pool is the house's money. Traders then open leveraged long or short bets against that pool, and a dual-oracle price feed keeps the numbers honest. Profits and losses flow between the traders and the vault.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- One desk for many markets. You can trade crypto, forex, and commodities in the same place, which few on-chain venues offer
- The 'zero-fee perpetuals' design means a fee only hits on a winning trade, a genuinely trader-friendly twist
- Strong backers and reach. Pantera and Founders Fund are behind it, and it grew into the busiest exchange on Base by volume (over $20 billion traded since launch, by the team's count)
- Leverage up to 500x is a wood-chipper for beginners. A small move the wrong way can wipe a position out entirely
- It owns no chain. If Base or its oracles have a bad day, Avantis inherits the problem and cannot route around it
- Real-world-asset trading sits in a grey legal zone, and rules could tighten on it. Much of its volume also leans on incentives, which may not last forever
🧬 Evolution lineage
Avantis is not a fork or a sibling of any coin. It is an app built on the Ethereum and Base ecosystem, and its design follows the perp-exchange family, the same line of thinking as GMX, dYdX, and Hyperliquid, rather than copying a Layer 1.
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is Avantis?
- A trading app that runs on the Base blockchain. It lets people open leveraged bets on crypto and on real-world things like forex and commodities, all without a central exchange holding the money. AVNT is its token.
- Does Avantis have its own blockchain?
- No. Avantis is a set of smart contracts living on Base, which is Coinbase's Layer 2 built on Ethereum. It borrows Base's security and has no chain or miners of its own.
- What are 'zero-fee perpetuals'?
- It is Avantis' best-known feature: you only pay a trading fee on trades that end in profit. A losing trade still costs you the loss itself, but it does not add a fee on top of that.
- How many AVNT tokens are there?
- The supply is capped at 1 billion AVNT, and no more can ever be made. Around 324 million were in circulation in mid-2026, with the rest unlocking slowly over time through vesting.
- Is Avantis safe for beginners?
- Trading on Avantis means using leverage of up to 500x, where a small price move against you can wipe out a position. It is built for active traders, not for holding. If you are new, treat it as something to study first, with at most a small amount. (Information only, not advice to use any particular exchange or to invest.)
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only