Designing markets requires adversarial thinking, economic intuition, systems knowledge, and taste. The first three are table stakes.
As an engineer, taste is the visceral discomfort you feel when a system has hidden fragility, even if it "works”. You sense something is broken before you can articulate why, and then you spiral until you can.
This is the only way I know how to build things, and it's shaped by experience.
Serum's matching engine had an event queue that split matching and settlement into two separate transactions. The first time I read the code, I knew something was off: the design introduced an asynchronous bottleneck in the hot path. Every maker fill had to wait for a third-party transaction before funds became available. Phoenix V1 eliminated this by settling both sides of all trades atomically.
In 2022, every indexer on Solana relied on program logs for state reconstruction. The problem was that program logs could get truncated, and any system built on them could never have full data integrity. That felt unacceptable to me, so I pioneered using no-op CPIs to circumvent this entirely by emitting the event in the call data. The mechanism is now widely adopted across Solana and natively supported in Anchor.
Brittle systems fail when the pressure is high, and markets are adversarial environments where high pressure is the default state.
Building a perps exchange on Solana is one of the toughest problems in DeFi. Margin systems, funding rate mechanisms, liquidation engines, and oracle integration are all areas where one wrong decision can lead to catastrophe.
Our team has traded real markets and built real trading systems in TradFi. We know what markets do under stress because we've been on the other side. That experience gives us the intuition to know which tradeoffs matter and which don't. And we're too stubborn to accept the important ones that feel wrong, even when they're easier.
We've made plenty of mistakes along the way, but we have always kept them out of the critical path. Good design and a strong foundation give you room to absorb surprises and adapt without large breaking changes.
For Solana to win in on-chain perps, you need a foundation built by people who are pathologically uncomfortable with fragility. That's us.
The rest is execution.
