Cascade, a 24/7 crypto brokerage backed by Polychain, Variant and Coinbase Ventures, is shutting down months after saying its private beta surpassed $1 billion in trading volume.
- The company announced the shutdown on Saturday, saying Cascade is "no longer operational" and directing users with remaining funds to a withdrawal portal.
Today, we're disappointed to announce that Cascade is…— Cascade (@cascade_xyz) September 12, 2026
- "Over the last 5 years, Cascade (formerly Perennial) set out to build the next generation of the modern brokerage experience," the team said, describing its goal as a single platform giving users round-the-clock access to global markets.
- Cascade didn't give a specific reason for shutting down or say whether a July exploit that temporarily drained over $1.3 million in user funds contributed to the decision.
$15 million and a pitch to build a crypto-native Robinhood
Cascade emerged from the team behind Perennial, an earlier decentralized derivatives protocol, with an ambitious plan to build a brokerage where users could trade crypto alongside synthetic exposure to stocks.
- In December 2025, Cascade announced a $15 million seed round co-led by crypto venture firms Polychain Capital and Variant, with Coinbase Ventures and Archetype among the other investors.
The company called itself a "neo-brokerage" and planned markets tied to assets ranging from bitcoin to commodities and private companies such as OpenAI, SpaceX and Stripe.
Unlike buying an actual share, those markets were designed as perpetual contracts, financial products that track an asset's price without giving traders ownership of the underlying asset.
Cascade co-founder Kevin Britz told The Block at the time that the company wanted a centralized-exchange-style product capable of onboarding ordinary users, including bank deposits through Stripe-owned stablecoin infrastructure provider Bridge.
Perennial, which Cascade now describes as its former identity, raised a separate $12 million seed round in 2022 led by Polychain and Variant, with Coinbase Ventures, Archetype and others participating.
From $1 billion in beta volume to an exploit
Cascade opened trading to a limited group through a private beta rather than a broad public launch.
Within its first week, the company said traders had already generated more than $100 million in volume. It later said cumulative private-beta volume had surpassed $1 billion, crediting its early traders and testers for helping refine the product.
A relatively small group of active traders can generate large cumulative volume by repeatedly opening and closing leveraged positions.
Cascade also operated a liquidity strategy known as CLS, which used deposited capital to help provide liquidity for trading.
That became the center of a security incident on July 15.
Cascade said attackers built long positions in thinly traded markets while CLS was taking the other side, then manipulated mark prices upward. The resulting liquidations allowed the attackers to withdraw roughly $1.34 million, prompting Cascade to pause trading and withdrawals.
This is what we know:
1. On thin liquidity markets, most of the orderbook orders were created by…— Cascade (@cascade_xyz) July 16, 2026
The incident ultimately didn't leave users with the roughly $1.3 million loss. Cascade later said the parties involved cooperated and returned the drained funds, allowing affected users to recover 100% of their account values as measured immediately before the incident.
Cascade is now telling users that any remaining funds can be claimed through claim.equilibria.xyz using Privy Home, while warning them to use only the link published through its official website.