😎Lighter's Founder on Ethereum's Fastest DEX: LIT, Robinhood, and The TradFi-DeFi Bridge Summary😎 Q1. How would you evaluate your current performance compared to a year ago? • Pre-launch stage a year ago > Current daily organic trading volume: $4-5 billion • The volume decline since October 10th is not due to the TGE, but rather a normalization caused by the clearing of wash/civil accounts • This is a long-term expansion strategy, not a short-term event • Currently, it is scalable on a healthy foundation Q2. How did you enter finance and trading? • Background in mathematics and computer science • Quantitative approach to finance • Experience in Citadel, which has enabled you to develop market structure, risk management, and infrastructure design capabilities Q3. In one sentence, what makes Lighter different? • Design based on five principles: low cost, low latency, security, verifiability, and composability • Cryptographic proof of approximately 500 million daily orders • Verification-based architecture, not trust-based • Actively leveraging DeFi's composability Q4. Why is zk technology important? • zk simultaneously addresses scalability and verification • Builds custom zk circuits specifically for finance • Costs for processing 500 million daily orders are approximately $50,000 • Securing economic feasibility compared to general-purpose architectures is a key competitive advantage Q5. Do you believe it can truly compete with centralized exchanges? • DeFi's past lack of product-market fit is acknowledged • Currently, it can compete with CEXs in terms of latency and cost • Expects DeFi market share to increase in the long term • Competition is positive for industry development Q6. How does LLP work, and why did it shift to LIT staking? • Community capital-based market-making pool (approximately $500 million) • Stable absolute returns, but capacity limitations exist • Transition from the existing points-based model to a LIT staking-based model • A more consistent and sophisticated structure in the long term Q7. What is the actual utility of the LIT token? • Access to LLP • Discounted fees • Priority execution speed • Access to advanced data • Up to 15% funding fee rebate • Buybacks have already begun, and according to Vlad's statement, more than half of the profits have been used for buybacks. (This does not definitively state a fixed 50% policy; he simply stated that more than half of the profits have been used.) • Program-based buyback structures are also planned for the future. Q8. What is your relationship with Robinhood and what are your plans for tokenized stocks? • Robinhood is actively expanding on-chain • Interoperability exists • Tokenized stocks will expand beyond Perf to Spot • The ultimate goal is to build a TradFi-DeFi connection infrastructure Q9. What is your stance on regulation? • Currently not accepting US customers • Focusing on smart regulation, not regulatory evasion • DeFi is structurally transparent and traceable Q10. What is your long-term roadmap? • Tokenized spot stocks • Options • Prediction markets • zkVM-based expansion • Fixed income products, such as on-chain bonds • Going beyond a simple exchange to become a comprehensive on-chain financial infrastructure layer