Cascade Project Overview: A one-stop, 24/7 trading platform integrating crypto and traditional finance

Cascade’s founding team publicly stated on Tuesday that their platform aims to emulate modern retail brokerage services while operating on a new execution and settlement architecture built for 24/7 trading.

Currently, the platform is open to some depositors by invitation only, with plans to fully launch to the public in early 2026, initially supporting more than 10 perpetual contract markets.

01 Project Overview

Cascade is a fintech startup headquartered in New York that recently unveiled its core product. The company positions itself as a “new type of brokerage service” provider, with its main innovation being the development of a unified margin account system.

This account allows users to trade 24/7 across cryptocurrencies, major US stocks, and even perpetual contracts of private companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe.

02 Operating Mechanism

From a technical architecture perspective, Cascade’s goal is to bring the speed and transparency of fintech trading into the perpetual contract market. It is not just a simple interface aggregator but is based on a completely new execution and settlement architecture.

The protocol adopts a hybrid architecture: a non-custodial matcher responsible for off-chain price discovery and order matching to achieve sub-second execution speeds; on-chain perpetual contracts act as executors, responsible for the final settlement of trades.

In terms of risk management, the platform will use verified data sources from Stork as real-time price oracles and tie into an automatic liquidation mechanism to ensure timely liquidation when positions fail to meet margin requirements.

03 Core Product Features

Cascade’s vision is to create a single account where users can “own stocks, trade digital assets, borrow against their investment portfolio, and access synthetic exposure within a continuously settling, 24/7 available account.”

The unified margin account is the cornerstone of Cascade. Users do not need to transfer funds or manage dispersed positions across multiple platforms; all assets and trades are integrated into one interface.

Its 24/7 trading capability breaks through traditional stock market trading hours, allowing users to trade perpetual contracts on traditional assets like US stocks at any time.

In terms of deposits and withdrawals, Cascade integrates Stripe’s Bridge, enabling users to directly link bank accounts for fiat deposits and withdrawals, creating a seamless connection from traditional finance to crypto assets.

04 Market Positioning

The emergence of Cascade coincides with the accelerating growth of the decentralized perpetual contract trading ecosystem. Industry data shows that by October 2025, the leading perpetual contract DEX had reached a record monthly trading volume of $1.2 trillion.

This innovative model intersects with multiple trends. On one hand, on-chain platforms like Ostium are beginning to offer perpetual contracts on synthetic assets such as gold and pork belly futures.

On the other hand, traditional brokerages like Robinhood are transforming into multi-asset brokers, allowing users to trade a wide range of assets from traditional stocks, tokenized stocks, to foreign exchange, digital currencies, and commodities.

What makes Cascade unique is its pursuit of comprehensive asset coverage while striving to offer user experience comparable to centralized exchanges, aiming to attract a broader mainstream user base.

05 Funding Background and Development

Strong capital support has laid a solid foundation for Cascade’s development. The company has successfully completed a $15 million seed round of funding.

This round was led jointly by Polychain Capital and Variant, with support from top crypto investment firms like Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, and others. The backing from these investors provides not only funding but also industry resources and credibility.

Cascade’s co-founder Kevin revealed a longer-term product roadmap in an interview. He stated that in the future, Cascade might evolve into a unified trading and banking account, where users can even use funds from their trading accounts for daily expenses.

“We will also issue a bank card,” Kevin said, “so you can directly spend funds from your trading balance, eliminating the separation between Web3 and Web2 experiences and connecting everything together.”

06 Potential Challenges

Although Cascade’s model is innovative, its development still faces dual uncertainties from regulation and market dynamics.

Perpetual contracts are high-risk derivatives involving high leverage. Combining these products with traditional assets like US stocks and promoting them to a wider retail audience could attract close regulatory scrutiny.

Market-wise, Cascade needs to compete simultaneously with established traditional brokerages, professional crypto trading platforms, and emerging DeFi protocols. Whether its “all-encompassing but not specialized” positioning can attract a sufficiently large user base remains to be seen.

Future Outlook

Looking ahead, the Cascade team has already begun preparations for the platform’s mainnet launch, scheduled for the first quarter of 2026.

By opening the Gate app, users can observe the overall trend of the perpetual contract sector on the market page. In the future, as platforms with integrated innovative features launch their own tokens or partner assets, mainstream trading platforms like Gate are very likely to be among the first to allow investors to access and trade them.