TLDR

In this episode of BidCast, Jason speaks with Tristan, co-founder of Zeta and Bullet, about their journey in the DeFi space, the challenges of building on Solana, and their plans for the future. They discuss the technical expertise of their engineering team, the importance of user experience, and their go-to-market strategy for Bullet. Tristan shares insights on market making, user acquisition, and the significance of community engagement in their tokenomics. The conversation highlights the potential for Bullet to compete with centralized exchanges and the importance of building a sustainable trading platform.

Chapters / Timeline

• 00:00 Opening

• 00:51 Introduction to BidCast and Zeta

• 01:53 The Journey of Zeta and Bullet

• 04:31 Engineering Expertise Behind Bullet

• 06:10 Challenges of Building on Solana

• 07:52 Technical Innovations in Bullet

• 12:01 User Experience and Onboarding Improvements

• 13:34 Future of Solana and Bullet's Role

• 14:53 Bridging and Interoperability Challenges

• 16:31 Market Making and Liquidity Strategies

• 19:12 Go-to-Market Strategy for Bullet

• 25:36 User Acquisition and Retention Strategies

• 31:29 Volume Expectations and Market Positioning

• 35:31 Market Dynamics and Trading Volume Insights

• 36:21 Incentives and Organic Growth Strategies

• 39:16 Revenue Projections and Tokenomics

• 44:28 Security Concerns and Risk Management

• 47:26 Learning from Past Mistakes in Crypto

• 50:50 Product Development and Listing Strategies

• 54:04 Token Migration and Community Engagement

• 01:02:02 Financial Position and Future Plans

Transcript

<< Jason Kam (00:52) >>:

Okay, welcome to another episode of BidCast. I'm your host Jason Kam, aka @MapleLeafCap . Today is June 18th, 2025, 10 a.m. Hong Kong time. BidCast is being livestreamed to BidClub members. Questions are from the members and my own. This is not financial advice. Today I'm speaking with Tristan, co-founder of Zeta and soon to be Bullet. Tristan, welcome.

<< Tristan (01:15) >>:

Yeah, great to be on here, Jason. Really, really appreciate it.

<< Jason Kam (01:18) >>:

Yeah, nice shirt. A lot of people don't know this, but you can buy the Bull Exchange token now through $ZEX Zeta token. It's kind of an interesting best kept secret until it became public with Ansem and Monk a couple days ago.  I think it's on people's mind, pretty straightforward. question,  how long have you been working on Bullet And maybe just walk me through the journey of the past four years when you built Zeta, Option, Dex, and then this.

How did it evolve and how have you been working on Bullet itself?

<< Tristan (01:53) >>:

Yeah, good question. guess the truthful answer is pretty much four years at this point, we've been basically full time building in DeFi. We started off in the very early days of 2021 trying to build a derivatives exchange. We started off building essentially options and that was the inception of data markets. And then we essentially kind of pivoted more around the time that FTX melted down into perpetuals trading, just finding a lot more PMF on the...

perpetual side as well as just it's a it's a much more simple product to build. And so we were one of the very early Solana projects, there was nothing there back in the day, back in 2021. And I was fortunate enough to meet and it totally was very impressed with his vision and what was possible on the chain. And so we kind of pioneered that fully on chain order book, you know, off the back of Serum, which is essentially one of those kind of core primitives back in the day, more for spot trading, we decided let's extend that for options trading and then perps trading.

And so we had a good amount of success, especially last year when Solana really started taking off. We scaled to over 100,000 users, roughly 150,000, I think. And we did $15 billion of notional kind of purpose volume traded through the platform. So that really gave us a lot of clarity on how to build a good exchange. And I would say more recently, probably about a year ago, we decided to kind of kick things off with Bullet specifically, which was kind of a...

a more focused bet on specific infrastructure for perps trading. We essentially had run into a few kind of technical and scaling issues with fully on chain order books built on Solana. We can dive into the specifics later. And so we made this slightly more ballsy pivot into doing our own kind of roll up execution layer for Solana. And that's what ended up being bullet.  And now we're like getting, we're on test net and getting a bit closer to main net so we can kind of shame on.

<< Jason Kam (03:40) >>:

Yeah, I guess this is a pretty straightforward question. For those who don't know, maybe tell me a bit more about the engineering team's background. At least to me, a Perp DEX is anybody can kind of build it, but to make it good, it requires a lot of technical chops. Like Jeff at HyperLiquid prides himself with being HRT and really deep from Wall Street. What qualifies you guys to build this, technically speaking?

<< Tristan (04:08) >>:

Yeah, that's a really good question. I respect the hyperliquid guys a lot. I've met Jeff before and chatted to him and I think he has very deep knowledge of the space. And I think it's great that they worked on the trading side through Chameleon for a couple of years and that gets you really intimately familiar with how exchanges work, at least from kind of like a user perspective and then flipping to be the other side in the exchange builder. I think there's a lot of good context there.

I guess fairly similarly for us, like a lot of our team had been in crypto for a number of years. I'd been in crypto since 2017, kind of like on and off, you know, a bunch of my other kind of friends, kind of started from just a bunch of us, you know, from university, essentially all knew each other for quite some time. My background is more in technology and those kinds of systems, but thankfully my co-founders and a bunch of the early team were all from HFT trading. And that's why I was kind of friends with them. I was always dabbling and

crypto and HFT stuff for a bit. And so we have a pretty strong bench, I would say, of talent there, both on the HFT and crypto native side. For example, most of our backend engineering team comes from top firms like Optiva, IMC, if you're familiar with a bunch of these kind of traditional firms, they're basically some of the top tier electronic market making firms, similar to Hudson River Trading, I guess.

And in terms of crypto native talent, for example, my co founder actually used to be one of the first market makers on Kyber network back in I think it was 2017 or 2018 when like DEXs were really starting to take off. We also hired people more recently, for example, on the growth side hired the guy who used to lead product growth at Bybit and who's kind of seen a lot of their kind of growth systems work really well. And so yeah, I think we have a good mix of talent there. And like you said, building an exchange is a highly technical

complex system  and to that effect we've been building over the last couple of years. We've never had any exploits. We've run an exchange in like a pretty good fashion I would say. We take a slightly more kind of conservative approach trying to do things the right way and trying to play that survival and that kind of like long-term game.

<< Jason Kam (06:10) >>:

Yeah, that's good background.  And why build the CLOB not on a SOL L1 and opt for a roll-up on top? How is it different than other things like Soon and Sonic, I guess?

<< Tristan (06:27) >>:

Good question. That's pretty loaded questions. A lot of stuff in there. could probably talk for a very long time, but I'll try and give you the long and the short of it. Essentially, I would say about a year ago or even longer than that  in the bear market, we were just kind of hitting some scalability issues, but those issues essentially got exacerbated when things started to pick up in terms of adoption. And I kind of chatted to Anatoly and some of the engineering team on some of the issues that we were doing scaling kind of.

fully on chain order books. And I think now they're obviously in race mode trying to get all this stuff fixed, but we didn't have the liberty of time. We had to kind of take things into our own hands essentially as an application.  And so some of to kind of rattle off some of the issues Solana still has discrete 400 millisecond block times. If you compare this to Binance, which is basically the primary market for price discovery, that's happening at about five to 10 milliseconds. So you're basically two orders of magnitude off  in terms of those trade execution latencies.

And so you see a lot of the flows that are happening on chain, especially on the purpose markets, which move very quickly. It's a lot of centralized decentralized art. You can imagine one venue is updating very quickly, you know, over 10 X the rate of the other one. And you're just kind of like someone like winter meters, just sitting there and always doing this arbitrage essentially.  And so on chain can never really compete in terms of being the primary venue for price discovery. And that's why with Bullet, we really wanted to like our main focus pretty much in our main unique value proposition is like, let's bring those latencies down as much as possible.

So in production in testnet right now, we're seeing a kind of end to end trade execution times of 3.5 milliseconds essentially. And that's because we run it in pure RAS. There's no virtual machine overhead. It's like very performant. And we also adopt this continuous streaming model. So we don't have discrete blocks basically as soon as your transaction is submitted, you get a pre confirmation essentially right away. And this makes it feel a lot more like a centralized exchange while still being kind of transparent and verifiable. So that's one thing on slow block times.

Next one was congestion essentially. When you're on a general purpose L1 and you're competing with PumpFun and you're competing with all these NFT platforms, you have this noisy neighbor problem essentially. And so it was really hard running  a proper exchange where people need to cancel their orders, liquidations need to go off. And if you can't get your transaction through in the same slot essentially, or even in the next couple of slots, that degrades the trading experience a lot. And as a platform, that's actually quite risky.

If you can't get off liquidations in a timely manner, you could actually go bankrupt as a platform because you are offering leverage essentially. These things need to be very guaranteed.  And yeah, we were just thinking like, why isn't NFT going to bring down our exchange? This kind of doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  Then there was some more kind of like trading related stuff that is basically like the kind of big topic right now of discussion in the Solana space. So all around adverse selection. So for the traders in the crowd, there's a big problem where you have

<< Jason Kam (09:00) >>:

Hmm.

<< Tristan (09:15) >>:

toxic flow and essentially if you're providing maker liquidity, people are coming there with informed knowledge or some kind of signal and being able to basically trade against you, make a bunch of money. And so right now, basically the meta is on Solana, it is fundamentally like pretty negative EV to market make across the CLOBs as well as across like a bunch of other kinds of systems there. And those MM's just kind of bleed P &L. The reason is, and if I was to explain this in simple terms,

Imagine we have the $SOL perp essentially, it's quoted bid price 99 ask price like 101 is your market. And yes, your kind of midpoint is essentially $100 for $SOL Suddenly, Binance for some reason, who knows Trump tweets something crazy or Elon Musk does something, the price basically just like jumps to 110 on Binance. Suddenly, you have this ask that's still in the book at 101.

and you have this race essentially the maker is trying to go and cancel their order because that 101 is now very stale and you have a take a boat racing in there and saying hey if I lift this 101 ask I'm actually going to capture $9 of profit essentially and so it's negative EV in that the MM has to bid up the gas fees as much as possible to like win in that GTO auction and get in there first and cancel or they kind of risk losing and having their quote picked off and losing a bunch of money like P &L on the exchange so

in either way you're having to pay up a bunch of money, whether it's through the priority fees or whether it's through the loss of P &L. And so with Binance, they have this first come first serve model, which is a bit different to Solana, which is more auction based. Whoever has the fastest execution  environment will basically wipe the floor with everyone else. And that's kind of what you're seeing with more of these HFT guys. Like they really dominate because they have really good execution in front. And so Hyperliquid took a really interesting approach. They added essentially this opinionated cancel prioritization.

It means that when you build the block essentially, your cancels or any kind of cancels for makers in there basically get executed by default first. And so that means that you essentially have what is in effect like a last look or a free option to cancel. And it kind of removes this  adverse selection because the maker can essentially get out of the way  as much as possible. This is nice in that they can tighten up spreads to like one basis point with a bunch of size and they can be pretty confident that they're just not going to get sniped all the time.

And so this brings down the barrier, I guess, to market making. Even if you're a random dude running a Python script, you can provide a lot of maker liquidity and not get completely destroyed by like one of these HFT companies. And so I kind of democratize a bit. So we've been playing around with that as well. We have a POC for that, this kind of like speed bump feature, which we'll also be adding because we really care about getting day one, like very good maker liquidity.  And then because I'm going a bit over here, we have a few other kind of features which are really nice.

<< Jason Kam (11:59) >>:

No, it's fine.

<< Tristan (12:01) >>:

Gas less onboarding is really good. can kind of sponsor gas. We think it's really important when you come into crypto, you don't have to buy like random token and generally like onboarding is a bit janky. We also work with privy to kind of abstract a lot of that wallet experience doing something more kind of similar to session keys. So you'll log in there. You don't need to buy a random gas token to start trading. Essentially, you'll just bring your USDC or whatever it might be as your trading collateral.  You'll establish a session key and then you can essentially just click trade.

long short do whatever you like to do. This is kind of a pain point with our old platform and pretty much every Solana trading experience on the L1 is you have to sign every transaction the centralized exchange guys come in there and they're like what is this it's like flow clunky  annoying  yeah that's pretty much like all that we were trying to solve is like build something that is going to compete one-to-one with the centralized exchange  but have self-custody properties have verifiability all these other things.

<< Jason Kam (12:56) >>:

Do you feel like Anatolia and the Solana team can build in these kind of features within the mainnet? Especially priority cancel and those kind of things.

<< Tristan (13:04) >>:

It's a good question. mean, it's an active area of research. They have some nice blogs on it essentially, and I've talked to them in depth about it. I understand their solution.  But I think there is like, even if they do manage to pull it off, it's undoubtedly going to be quite a long journey for them.  To give you the long and the short of it, they need to ship a bunch of like very core protocol upgrades. One of them being async execution, which I think is basically in development right now. That's kind of the prerequisite to multiple concurrent leaders.

<< Jason Kam (13:21) >>:

Hmm.

<< Tristan (13:34) >>:

This is like a pretty complex change. I think the spec for it is pretty difficult to get your head around. I'm still kind of getting to grips with it.  It's a big change. I don't think anyone's nailed it in any other crypto network. And to be honest, if any blockchain engineering team is to do it, I think the Solana team is the best. But I realistic timelines, the optimists in the crowd say it's going to take a year. Probably the more realists or pessimists say it's going to take two years to ship. And the reason that's important is they want to add some kind of a transaction metadata.

It means that you can label your transaction on the Solana L1 as a cancel, for example, and then the leader will kind of be able to reorder them themselves. The problem is censorship. If there's a single leader right now on Solana, it could just ignore it and just say, no, I'm not going to do that. So if you have multiple leaders, you would actually broadcast it to say three of those leaders. You would have hopefully an honest majority that could kind of agree.  But yeah, you still don't get the latency guarantees that we get.

because all those three leaders have to communicate with each other. There's a bunch of kind of consensus and agreements going on there. Whereas with a roll up, you just have kind of a single sequence that you get very fast acknowledgements, not just inclusion, but also execution. We think that's definitely the best for trading.

<< Jason Kam (14:44) >>:

And then bridging and experience if I'm a Solana user today, the bridge is how fast? Once mainnet.

<< Tristan (14:52) >>:

The bridge will be very fast. We just finished our integration with hyperlane. It's basically going to be the finality of Solana, which is 32 slots. And if you do that by 400 milliseconds, it's like 12 seconds essentially. That's in the worst case. That's if you fully wait for finalized. We think there's some clever stuff you can do similar to what people do on L1 apps, which is they use a lower confirmation level. For example, confirmed essentially is once everyone kind of votes on blocks.  And so we think we can basically issue a bridge confirmation within

probably around a second essentially, but then we'll have to do some smart UX stuff, which is like, we don't actually let people trade until the 12 second like full functionality has elapsed, but you will see the funds within your kind of balance at that time. And I think that makes it basically feel exactly like it otherwise would using an L1 kind of program.

<< Jason Kam (15:39) >>:

But I guess the dollars that I have on your roll up is not going to be composable with all the protocols that exist on Solana mainnet today.

<< Tristan (15:48) >>:

That's a good question. Yeah, we're still figuring out the interoperability and composability parts of that. Like, yes, fundamentally, you have to bridge and we will have kind of separate funds there. The nice thing is if you use Solana for DA, you can get some kind of asynchronous composability benefits. And I'm actually talking to guys like the VP of Solana Foundation,  yeah, Solana Foundation for like a bunch of the engineering stuff.

to figure out ways that we can kind of try and compose with Spot Liquidity on Jupiter and some of these other platforms. Definitely like a tricky problem, but I think there's some ideas that we have, some designs that we think would be cool.

<< Jason Kam (16:21) >>:

Yeah, I guess the lack of immediate day one composability, I suppose it shouldn't be an issue because people are not on the to like do DeFi stuff or Ponzi stuff. It's just here to trade. Am I?

<< Tristan (16:31) >>:

That's correct.

think people largely agree that perhaps exchanges don't need to be composable.  think even a bunch of people on Solana kind of agree with that as well. And you've kind of seen this in practice. look at all the big exchange, look at Binance is obviously the biggest example. I don't think they need to vertically, or sorry, like integrate with a bunch of other stuff. They just vertically integrate. just own everything. Hyperliquid as well. You know, they've kind of like built a bit of their own ecosystem. They don't really need to compose with existing Ethereum primitives.

DYDX, all these other ones, think, kind of just like own the whole thing themselves and it works out well for them.

<< Jason Kam (17:05) >>:

Yeah, I suppose the beauty and the bull case people do talk about and eventually will become a reality would be that the Hyper-EVM itself would be able to yank liquidity away from the perp decks and utilize that liquidity for all sort of crazy things. So the whole thing is like hyper-composable.  I suppose it's... it on the road map? Is it easy to do for you to sort of allow for similar capabilities?

<< Tristan (17:30) >>:

Yeah, yeah, really good question. So we have like a not too dissimilar setup on our end, which is essentially we have our kind of like core exchange primitives, which is going to be the perps, spot and lending markets, which are kind of all need to gel together and need to be very high performance. This all runs like I said, in a pure Rust runtime. We don't do virtualization. We don't have a VM essentially, because we want really high performance and kind of highest potential, you know, gas limits and not to deal with other constraints.

But then we're going to ship, it'll be after mainnet, but hopefully sometime this year, essentially like a SVM module,  know, similar to how Hyperliquid has Hyper-EVM. And then the nice thing is you can essentially have these pre-compiles, which let you talk between the kind of core base layer primitives, as well as that kind of programmable smart contract environment. I think that's very doable. A lot of people have been building these SVM layer two roll-ups like  Soon and Sonic and these kind of ones.

We're a bit different in that we're not purely an SVM chain. Actually, our focus is just being on this application specific high performance roll up. We're not building like a SVM L2 on Binance Smart Chain, which is kind of what Soon are doing. We're very focused on the trading use case, getting those kind of that purpose exchange extremely good. And then if someone wants to build something composable in there, whether that be a vault or whether someone wants to build an Ethena type product that does this like  basis trade arbitrage and build a stable coin off that, that will all be.

possible to do on the kind of SVM side.

<< Jason Kam (19:00) >>:

that you will build.

<< Tristan (19:02) >>:

Yes, yes, we will have at least like the foundation for that. Whether we want to do that in-house or work with external teams, ideally it would be good to kind of like build that out and work with other builders on that.

<< Jason Kam (19:03) >>:

Mm.

I

see. mean, it's a lot on your plate. I could see why you were kind of deprioritizing, because the perp dex is like the most important thing, first and foremost. Testnet now.

<< Tristan (19:20) >>:

Yeah, I think my worry

is like focus. Like that's saying I see is kind of the problem with a lot of crypto teams is they're not focused. They try and bite off more than they can chew. It's like death by a thousand cuts. They try and do 20 different products under the one hood. And there's kind of like a lack of focus there for us. It's just like, get the main thing out, make it really good, start kind of gradually expanding. Don't take on too much. Like I said, we're only a team of 15 people essentially. there's only so much we can do. And I would rather deliver one really good product than five mediocre products.

<< Jason Kam (19:29) >>:

Yeah.

Yeah. How soon can you get to mainnet? Like when should we expect the first transaction on the Perp dex?

<< Tristan (19:56) >>:

Yeah, good question. I would say with high, high confidence Q3, probably early Q3, we're quite close. We just completed our main net audit a couple of weeks ago. All the fixes have been merged and that's looking really good. The main things that we need to get done are just finish off the hyperlane bridge, which is almost done. Iron out any kind of

other random bugs or kind of rough edges and do a few more performance optimizations. But I think largely it's looking pretty good. We're like 95 % done in terms of the feature work. So I'm pretty confident we can get out there quite quickly.

<< Jason Kam (20:29) >>:

And then day one, when it comes to mainnet, I mean, it's nice that you have like Amber and Wintermute and Jump previously supporting you on Venture Round.  How deep are you in the discussion with them in providing liquidity day one and what's their feedback so far?

<< Tristan (20:46) >>:

Yeah, good question. So it's very important for us to get good day one liquidity. If you understand the exchange business, essentially, the thing you need to solve for at least in the early days is the supply side. No one's going to come trade on your platform if you've got, you know, 1 % spreads and no liquidity. So you need to kind of solve that first. So we've been in pretty advanced discussions with a bunch of the guys on our cap table as well as other kind of market makers.

in that kind of environment. work with basically the three top on-chain MM's on Solana, as well as a bunch of the top guys on Binance already, and some of the top ones on Hyperliquid. ⁓ And so, some of them on our cap table have already been trading on ZETA on our previous platform, have done the integration. So we're in pretty advanced talks with them, just kind of getting a bunch of back and forth essentially on exchange feedback, API specs, and stuff like that. ⁓ These guys been pretty instrumental, to be honest, in how we design Bullet.

For example, I'll give a shout out to Tim, who's the head of  DeFi at Wintermute, who's given me a lot of really good feedback on what could have been improved with our previous product and how we want to change things going forward. So that's been really good. And I think those conversations have been very productive. And especially over the last week, I think we've seen a lot of renewed interest from people wanting to come on chain and trade on such a platform.  Outside of the market makers as well, we have a bunch of people who more run.

funds and are able to deploy into DeFi strategies. So we've been chatting to them about essentially we will have a similar kind of LP vault, which will help around like market making, know, funding arbitrage strategies, things like that. So we see people kind of looking for yield and deploying into those strategies. So trying to get some TVL in there, I think in the early days also very important.  Yeah, that's, that's pretty much the status. I would say those conversations.

<< Jason Kam (22:32) >>:

Was there feedback like it was unusable at Zeta before and  we moved to hype that was great and yours is way better than what Zeta was before but it's still kind of laggy? What's that like I'm trying to dig a little deeper. Are they like, my God, this is fantastic. We're going to deploy the same level of capital and attention we have to hyperliquid here or are they like still picking favorites here and there?

<< Tristan (22:56) >>:

That's a good question. think speaking to the old platform, yeah, definitely they had some gripes with it and they had gripes with all the Solana platforms essentially. One, just like a lot of the API interfaces, like very non-standard for traders essentially. You're using essentially like this JSON RPC layer, talking to RPCs and having to run your own RPCs, trying to get transactions included in blocks was like kind of a dark art at the time, still.

to be honest is they were also paying up so much for fees, like just really bleeding a lot of priority fees, like I mentioned, just to be able to replace their quotes.  And fundamentally, like they just complained about they were struggling to be profitable essentially on chain. And so it kind of led to a route where you have to subsidize it heavily essentially for them to make money. And that's not really sustainable in the long term. So we took a lot of that back to the drawing board. And fundamentally, the thing that we want to solve with the new platform is we want market makers to be

profitable because then they provide really good liquidity which means that normal traders can come in they can trade with really good prices essentially and the more that they kind of trading with the market makers the more the market makers can actually run their business model and kind of profit off the spreads which means they're willing to kind of quote even more competitively it's kind of like a dynamic that you essentially see on Robinhood with Citadel and stuff like that they want to be facing this retail flow and it helps them get price improvement ⁓

And so with the new exchange, we're still in the process of integration, but so far it's way more snappy. They get acknowledgments back way faster. We're trying to basically mirror a bunch of our API spec around Binance because that just like lowers the kind of, lowers the barrier, I guess, for integration. You don't have to deal with it extremely custom set up. It's kind of stuff that you're familiar with essentially. And getting those multiple millisecond confirmations makes it feel much better. People can kind of react very quickly to the market. So, so far, I think the feedback has been pretty good.

And we're good at taking on feedback. We're always like happy to iterate. The nice thing is now that we have a bit more discretion over our infrastructure stack and like owning that a bit more, we can really fully customize anything and build the best possible solution.

<< Jason Kam (24:56) >>:

 got it well ⁓ I Mean, I think market making is one is one thing having all the features you talked about and API access You know helps you get liquidity. I suppose the biggest challenge for any perp decks historically Supposedly it was UI UX issues. It was like a clunky experience, but now it's getting to the point where getting non-toxic retail or actually aggressive directional flow is been that's you know issue for a lot of these nascent startups and

I guess the biggest question then becomes how do you actually plan to get the flow from actual users? What's your GTM go-to-market plan?

<< Tristan (25:36) >>:

Good question and that's a really like insightful observation there because the thing that makes purpose exchanges go around is solving that demand side essentially having those retail people coming in there the thing that you want to avoid fundamentally is bring on too many market makers the whole you have market makers on both the maker side and then you have a bunch of these HFT takers and then it's just very PvP right like jump is trading gets winter mute against like the next guy no one's really making any money

and it's just kind of very kind of toxic environment. And this is sort of what you're seeing on a bunch of the other  perp dexes on Ethereum right now. And it's part of the reason why think Hyperliquid ate everyone's lunch there.  They managed to capture retail flow with a good product. Obviously, I think the airdrop helped with that as well. And it just kind of got this like sticky kind of network effect there, which is really good. And the MMS like really love quoting on there because they're like, I'm facing like normal people and it's much more fun. So

<< Jason Kam (26:30) >>:

Yep.

<< Tristan (26:32) >>:

That's a really important thing for us to solve for. I'm pretty confident we can solve on the maker side. So getting the demand side is really important. So what does our GTM look like to bring on real users?  I think a large part of it is just having a very Solana native go to market is important. It's a big reason why we just didn't decide. I didn't want to go and build a Cosmos chain or build on stocknet or something like that because I just don't think there's a lot of interest and you're not tapping into like a base of users that is particularly interesting.

But Solana I think has like the largest MAU of any chain. There's just like a lot of people using DeFi products, trading on chain, doing meme coin stuff, whatever it might be. And the good thing for us is we have been a pedigree in Solana. We've been around for four years. I know who most of the big on chain traders and trading groups are. You know, for example, like I talked with guys like, you know, for example, like a Joe McCann who runs a fund. He's like very actively trading, doing stuff like that. He's really wanted essentially like a Solana native purchase exchange that's competitive.

So working with those guys will get a lot of volume into the exchange. Targeting some of those bigger trading groups I think also important. Thinking about what regions we want to get into. There are some communities that we're pretty well aligned with. For example, the Bonk guys. I'm very close to the founder. He's actually an angel investor and we've talked about some kind of trading campaigns that we can do together. They have hundreds of thousands of holders, if not more, which is really great.  Something I like as well is just being the venue for Solana Native Assets.

pump fun coins coming off the bonding curve. That's great, you know, up until maybe a hundred mil market cap. But then above that, you're kind of listing on the tier one centralized exchanges. What if we could bring that back on chain? What if we could really prioritize some of these really promising new Solana teams and give them a good CLOB venue to essentially launch on? I think that would be really good. That's on the Solana native GTM, which I think we have good edge because we have a background there. There's other just like exchange playbook stuff that's pretty standard.

Referrals very important all the centralized exchanges do this well We previously ran a referral program on Zeta and we had over 30,000 users kind of come in through that  As well as like 3.5 billion dollars worth of volume, which I think is like pretty good We've done that before it's just like works very well Trading competitions very nice way to kind of bring in a bunch of new users Like I said, we hired this guy from from Bybit who essentially like was pretty instrumental in running a lot of their trading comps Which I think saw massive ROI and then there's a bunch of integrations

that are important that can kind of  funnel in a bunch of volume and open interest to us. So one is trading terminals, I think are a great entry point for a lot of professional traders.  We've been talking to a bunch of the bigger ones, for example, the Teal Street guys, we're like pretty close to, they have quite a lot of users. ⁓ We've been talking to aggregators like Ranger, I think you mentioned before, have been very eager to kind of integrate us and send a bunch of flow our way. And this is a really great way to just get these sticky.

Programmatic or professional traders who are going to have this repeat trading volume, which is important for us And then yeah using this kind of broker system essentially they refer us volume people do these kind of trading bots grid trading arbitrage funding rate strategies That's like really good for us There's the vault stuff which I talked about which I think it's just like a nice way for people to get involved There's white labeled front ends, which is pretty cool as well. This is something we're exploring we have

One thing cooking with like an existing Solana team that I think is quite solid.  They basically want to dumb down perhaps essentially for this kind of more on chain meme coin type audience. That's one click to essentially long and short a bunch of stuff. They're their own leaderboards, copy trading. And I think seeing the success that platforms like Axiom had, which kind of integrate both pump fun and hyper liquid. I think there's definitely some strong PMF there. And then using this kind of

brokerage system or kind of build a code system, I think is a nice way to give kickbacks and help those front ends kind of integrate and make a sustainable business model.  And then the last one I would say is mobile, I think is something that's been underwhelming or kind of underexposed on the trading side.  We have the chops on our team to build a mobile native app. We have some guys on our team who pretty good with React Native. I think seeing the success of Robinhood essentially on the option side.

<< Jason Kam (30:21) >>:

you

<< Tristan (30:45) >>:

with a mobile first trading experience. That's been really good to see and I think it's underappreciated in crypto. Even looking at Hyperliquid, they have a PWA. It's not super responsive. I don't think it cuts it super well. So I think there's good market there. And if you're following Solana,  they're doing the Seeker phone essentially, which is their own kind of Solana phone. They're gonna be launching their own token, their own incentives on that. And like I said, we're working with that gamified perhaps front-end team who are gonna be launching a kind of a native app.

on the Seeker Phone Day 1.

<< Jason Kam (31:17) >>:

I guess that's a good overview and coverage. Do you have a target in mind of what kind of volume you want to do in the first week, the first month, first couple months and so on?

<< Tristan (31:29) >>:

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, the more the better, obviously.  I think volume is a decent metric. We're also looking at like kind of monthly active users. think open interest is also like an important one to get up. last year, like I think we were routinely doing one to 200 mil  of volume a day, essentially, ⁓ which was like pretty solid. So I'm very confident we can get back to that with just like a few people integrated. I see Jupiter doing essentially

500 million to a billion dollars  a day  kind of fluctuates a bunch. I think that's like kind of the longer term goal is if we can build something that's a best in class exchange on Solana,  I don't see why more of that kind of volume would essentially migrate to us and we could kind of assimilate a lot of that that perps trading volume. So that's kind of my goal, I think within the first six months to essentially just try and leapfrog our way to to kind of number one on the Solana side. And then I think once we're at that kind of

500 mil level will probably be number two or three Hopefully on the perps leaderboard and then we can kind of continue to push from there

<< Jason Kam (32:30) >>:

So basically half a billion to a billion  daily volume.  Do you expect most of it to come from the central exchanges? Do you expect it come from share gain versus Jupiter  or Hyperliquid? Where do you expect it to come from?

<< Tristan (32:46) >>:

Yeah, I think given that our GTM is very Solana focused, we don't want to go too broad and try and go after a centralized exchange trading audience. That's like the longer term goal, I think. But in the short term, you know, those guys probably don't have a wallet, you got to get them to jump through some hoops, they got to like send it, like some friction in the process. So we'd rather just work with guys who are on chain native who already basically have a wallet, who've already traded on Solana, who already kind of know their way around it. And I think seeing the volume that

platforms like Jupiter are doing, I think that audience exists. And I think to be honest, it's not necessarily like a cannibalistic thing of like, we all have to fight for the same volume. kind of see it as hyper liquid was doing maybe 500 mil of volume  a day, like a year ago, but that's actually grown 10 X essentially, because I think the product is so much better. They've actually grown that category. And I think if you look at the emerging trend,  kind of on that side, Dex volume market share versus centralized exchange has actually been an increase in pie. And so I think the kind of

The kind of small-minded mindset is to look at like, we're all competing for the same 5,000 people, the same flow. When in reality, think Hyperliquid has 30,000 daily active users and Binance overall has 260 million users. I don't know how much that is in daily actives, but I would imagine they probably have tens of millions. So I think that pie is much bigger, much greater, and we just kind of want to grow that and grow into that as much as possible.

<< Jason Kam (34:10) >>:

 And I guess the Solana guys are... It would really sound like then it would be the whales, trading groups and  the funds that are very Solana aligned that will be taking their trading volume, let's say from Hyperliquid today to you, assuming it's a perps product in day one.

<< Tristan (34:35) >>:

Yeah, I think there would definitely be some crossover and we're definitely trying to target more of that professional audience because we found that flow is just more sticky. Like people come in and trade every day. Whereas if you just cater to a bunch of random airdrop farmers, right? Like they trade a bit, they get liquidated and then they kind of churn out and you know, they do like, you know, a couple of thousand dollars worth of volume and like that doesn't really like help our bottom line or help our product grow. But the guys that we've had the most productive conversations with like we just found you really only need like

50 people to be honest in a telegram group all talking together who can give product feedback who are going to kind of like stick by the product. And that's kind of what we built I guess through this like bear market period is kind of this is like core following. And those guys come in and trade every day their day trading, they kind of repeat volume, repeat customers essentially. And I would say those that kind of top end that kind of yeah top end of the market is essentially probably driving I don't know what the number is, but it's definitely Pareto distributed you know.

20 % of people are probably doing 80 % of the volume. It's probably even more skewed than that, to be honest.

<< Jason Kam (35:37) >>:

Have you gotten further indication already from some of the Solana whales that will be like just moving over to basically told you like yeah We're gonna do it or is it more like oh like this in yeah, okay

<< Tristan (35:45) >>:

Yeah,

don't know if I can share it. But yeah, I literally talked to one of the biggest fund managers on Solana. He said if this platform was live, I would trade like, like at least nine figures, if not like 10 figures on this platform, monthly tomorrow. So I was like, that's that's great. I'm glad to hear that. Because he is basically he's basically migrated from  one of the existing perps dexes on Solana to hyper liquid. And he's just like forced to trade that but he kind of doesn't want to.

<< Jason Kam (36:00) >>:

Okay. Okay, great.

I see. Interesting. Okay, very good.  How much token do you want to give out as a part of this process?

<< Tristan (36:14) >>:

Yep.

 That's a really good question. I think the most important thing is for us to get essentially organic traction as much as possible. I think if you rely too much on subsidies, you get kind of this points market fit, which is dangerous. You you kind of like fake the PMF somewhat. So our kind of important yardstick is like how much can we get people like genuinely trading on this thing, try and build up the PMF, try and keep repeat customers. And then I see incentives is essentially kind of like gasoline on that fire.

 So that's saying I really want to make sure that we have done before any kind of incentives really hit off in a big way. Once we start ramping that up, yeah, we're likely to have something like a points program or some other incentives. This was super effective last time that we did it. I think it's just like a really great growth tool. But our lesson learned there is I think focus on real long term uses as opposed to kind of trying to

I wouldn't say cater, like, you know, all these airdrop farmers come in, they're very short term, they don't really care about the product long term, they're just trying to farm a quick buck. And I think, you know, basically, like not prioritizing those guys, prioritizing the kind of early community people who actually trade and care about the product is definitely the kind of main tweak that we'd make there. So I can't share like concrete numbers on how much we would potentially give away. But our goal is definitely, we have we didn't give away too much on the previous token, we still have a bunch that we can kind of earmark from our

incentive budget and treasury which is good so I think we have a pretty healthy amount and I think our big learning there is it's important to have an early wealth effect for users so building that loyalty and kind of rewarding people for being early and for using the product and helping us scale is definitely something that we saw work very well on the kind of hype drop  they have this like massive maxi community and I think we would we would want to build a similar community essentially

<< Jason Kam (38:03) >>:

Yeah.

Yeah, and just so we have a sense, like it's a 20 % float today of Zex, how much did you give away for AirDrops?

<< Tristan (38:15) >>:

It was 10 % for the previous airdrop

<< Jason Kam (38:18) >>:

Okay, and how much are you playing with now that you could potentially give away?

<< Tristan (38:22) >>:

I mean, I don't want to commit to numbers, I think we could definitely... Yeah, I think we have... I forget the exact number, but in terms of what we have for... What do call it? For treasury and stuff like that, I don't remember the exact number off top of my head, but it was something like we have at least 30%. I have to do the math, essentially. Yeah. Yeah.

<< Jason Kam (38:25) >>:

No, just overall.

Got it. Okay. And

if you were to do it, it won't be like in one go, everything gone. It'll be like, let's truncate it over seasons and so on and so forth.

<< Tristan (38:52) >>:

Yeah, potentially, we're still kind of deciding that essentially, but whatever I think drives the most long term growth will be the direction that we go down.

<< Jason Kam (38:54) >>:

Hmm.

Got it. Understood.  So the goal would be like, you know, maybe like, if you hit all your benchmarks, the goal within the team internally, it would be by year end, by this point next year, a year from now, like 10 % of hyperliquid, basically, if you can get there.

<< Tristan (39:16) >>:

Yeah,

pretty much. think that's that's what we're shooting for. I mean, if you look at the volumes right now, like I said, Jupiter is the number one on Solana.  That's basically 10 % of hyper liquid, which is doing about $5 billion today. So I think that's that's like an achievable target. That's kind like my base case in my mind is where I want to get to in the the short to medium term.

<< Jason Kam (39:36) >>:

And with that volume, I'm guessing you'll have a HLP, so like a ZLP kind of, and then you have a bunch of other different type of fees. What would that overall, if you hit that target, what would that translate to in terms of revenue to maybe Zeta token holders?

<< Tristan (39:52) >>:

Yeah, good question. In terms of like the vaults, we're mostly just going to pass that yield and essentially that P &L directly back to users. So that's not necessarily, at least in the early days, not like a big revenue source for us. We want to democratize that and give that back to community. I think it's nice not having to purely depend on external market makers. And that's why HLP was really good as retail can come in, they can provide liquidity on these things. There was actually like very good gains to have in the early days.  But in terms of obviously we run an exchange.

there is a take rate and kind of trading fees that go through that. yeah, having value accrual to the token was actually our number one most requested feature on the previous token. And so if we do turn on a fee switch, we would want to be pretty aggressive with it. I will kind of caveat saying these are all hypotheticals. This is kind of like how we are thinking essentially. So there's like not financial advice or anything, but like if you were to do some of the numbers, crunch the numbers.

The guidance would be essentially if we were doing 500 mil daily volume and let's say we take a take rate of about three basis points. think that's kind of market standard. If you look at some of the other exchanges, Hyperliquid, think they're kind of take a fee is anywhere from two to 4.5 basis points. And on the maker side, it's a little bit lower, like averaging out, say three basis points. That would essentially give us a daily revenue of $150,000. And if you annualize that, that's essentially 55 million.

basically taking their  proportion that goes back into their assistance fund buybacks, they do 97%, essentially, which is pretty aggressive. I think we would also want to be pretty aggressive with that. We do want to beef up the insurance fund a bit, but we also want to give a bunch back  to users in the form of buybacks, potentially.  Let's say we take that number, 97%. That translates to $53 million of annual buybacks.  Our current circulating supplier, like we mentioned, is about 187%.

million tokens out of the one billion like total supply and if you take the hype market cap to revenue essentially multiple you can find this on Artemis and a few other places it's roughly 15x so the implied market cap I guess if we were to multiply that through would be 821 million and I guess the  current market cap where the token sits is about 35 so I think in that kind of case you're seeing a pretty good multiple

I also ran the numbers essentially on the bear and what I consider the bull case. Bear case I say would be 100 mil of daily volume. That was like half of what we were doing or kind of roughly similar to like half of what we were doing last year. And we had a much bigger take rate as well last year. I think it was about six basis points on average probably. And I'm modeling in 100 mil at three essentially. Even with that, I would say you run the numbers once again, the same kind of math.

I would imply a market cap of 164 mills. So it's about a 5x. And then the bull case, if you were to plug in a billion dollars daily volume, which is basically 2x jup or jup on a good day, which is assuming that we can kind of exceed expectations on the Solana side, that would pit it at a 1.6 billion market cap, which is a 45x. And then I did the ultra bull case, which is like, what if we can compete one to one with hyper liquid or just kind of seeing how the numbers match up.

<< Jason Kam (43:11) >>:

Yeah, the math got silly.

<< Tristan (43:11) >>:

And that actually

comes out, yeah, yeah. I mean, it actually kind of comes out to exactly what Hypo Liquid is doing in production, which is they're doing, my numbers came out to 820 mil in annualized revenue. The actual annualized revenue is 890 based  on Artemis And then it implies essentially a market cap of 12 billion and their actual market cap is 13. So the numbers actually came out pretty close.

<< Jason Kam (43:34) >>:

Yeah, I suppose. mean, the numbers, the numbers certainly make sense. And like the three bits is pretty standard. I suppose I suppose the biggest barrier like in your mind when you're plotting this and you're launching the platform, you know, like what  keeps you up because, you know, the math makes sense. The token is going to do very well if you hit that number. But what do you think would be the biggest barrier between like what you have now?

and maybe $500 million a day of volume. Is it, my god, we could run into bugs? Is it, ⁓ we have a pretty feature complete decent product, but it's still a little clunky that I didn't get it to place I want? Is it, people are already pretty happy on hyperliquid? They probably don't want to switch over. In your mind, what would stop you from getting that target?

<< Tristan (44:28) >>:

I guess the biggest existential threat or the thing that keeps me up at night as any exchange operator is like, you know, warrior potentially like an exploit or a hack. Like that's definitely the scariest thing. And we've spent a lot of time, obviously we just did a security audit. It's been a lot of time like auditing our contracts, checking all the kind of different attack vectors and even kind of like financial exploits that could happen.  For context, we've never been exploited over four years of  operation, touch wood, even though like

pretty much, I think every single perps platform, except for Jupiter, has been exploited on Solana. think Drift kind of famously lost 20 plus million dollars a couple of years ago with their kind of lunar markets and that kind of all imploding mango with the Abraham Eisenberg thing. They basically allowed for withdrawal of unrealized P &L as well as they allowed margining in their kind of native token, which is extremely low liquidity and able to be manipulated. And so we've made, I think, a lot more

wouldn't say smarter, but more conservative design decisions in terms of what collateral we kind of enable on the platform, what kind of assets we list, how we kind of tweak a bunch of these parameters. I think we're playing kind of playing the longer term game where we need to be around for a number of years. We can't just like go hard and fast and take all these crazy risks and blow up like we're trying to play a longer term game. So that definitely keeps me up at night, but we have a really smart engineering team. We've really gone hard essentially on like...

monitoring DevOps reliability. So we have like observability dashboards and everything. We're kind of like 24 seven monitoring a bunch of stuff. Everyone's on call. If something goes wrong, I get working up at 3am in the middle of the night to go fix it. So we try and really be on the the ball with stuff. In my mind, I feel like if we execute on the product, and it's really good. And there's this kind of like captive tan of Solana who are kind of excited to use the product and from the conversations I've been having and from obviously all the traction that we've been getting in the last couple of weeks.

I think there is some pretty strong PMF there. So I feel like if we just kind of keep leaning into that with a really good product experience and we do all the right things and just kind of trim down our roadmap and deliver something that is like achievable, get there to market. I do feel like I'm quite confident that we will kind of get out there and start raising that volume.

<< Jason Kam (46:41) >>:

Yeah, the way I see it, I guess it's the way of the Solana native guys, it's their way of getting their huge potential airdrop from rerunning the Hyper Liquid Playbook on a hopefully similar product. I suppose because you have built a similar Perpdex before on Solana. There are many attempts by other players also historically. Those never seem to take off beyond...

people farming the points, they never were sustainable like the way Hyper liquid was. Like, I guess you're confident today on you can potentially achieve that volume sustainably because the product historically just weren't that good because is that how you would think about it? this time it will be very different  there been new learnings along the way? Yeah.

<< Tristan (47:26) >>:

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

No, I think I think you hit the nail on the head. I think  much as I maybe hate to say this, I think the bar is relatively low in crypto. And if Jeff kind of proved anything, they just locked in, put their heads down and executed out executed like pretty much the rest of the market. That's pretty obvious. I think if you just crypto tends to be more short term horizon, I think. And if you can survive past I think that first like six months to a year of operation is pretty critical, right?

Like it's easy to raise money, it's easy to get a bunch of hype. know, there's always like testnet products right now that are like, we're the greatest, you know, and that stuff doesn't matter, you know, until you actually launch the product and you have users. Like, yeah, you get all the Twitter metrics and the engagement,  but you're almost overfitting to the wrong kind of metrics that you really need to be out there showing real growth potential. And I think that's why crypto has such a focus  for the worst, I think on infrastructure.

It's because infrastructure doesn't have to show real growth metrics, right? If you were like a real web 2 app, you have to show that you're growing. Otherwise, like no one will find you and your product will die essentially. For some reason, people get around it in crypto and last for a couple of years in this kind of zombie state. And it's a big reason why I think people are scared to do apps in crypto, right? Because it's goddamn hard to do because you actually have to grow, you actually have to have real product market fit. Very few products you can kind of point to and say that they actually have this. And so from our perspective, yeah, that's always been the focus for us is

I'm not a marketing genius per se, but I think we can do the product growth really well, which is I want to get to a position where the product essentially sells itself. We still just kind of happen on exchanges like FTX back in the day. We actually had a guy back in the day who joined us from FTX and he said, my job was the easiest in the world doing BD for FTX because literally I didn't have to like push it on anyone. The product was so good, people would just use it immediately because it was the best thing on the market. And that's kind of where I want to get to. And then my other point is we've learned a lot over the last four years.

<< Jason Kam (49:18) >>:

Hmm.

<< Tristan (49:21) >>:

And not to talk ourselves up too much, but like we made a lot of mistakes. We've learned from them We've done basically through this trading product perps exchange for four years. We've also launched a token before You know, there's like lots of things that you can mess up that you can learn from we've kind of already made a bunch of those mistakes So I feel much more confident kind of going into into the next leg of the journey that we kind of know a lot more there there's like a lot of Bespoke like first-hand experience and then I see a bunch of these new kind of club teams perp teams coming up. They're very hot, know, you got

whatever building on some cool new chain with some cool new founders and they just raised a big round from whoever it might be.  But yeah, they're going to run into a lot of the same problems. I see people trying to build fully on chain order books like we were trying to do a couple of years or let's do it on Monad or something like that. And I'm like, I don't see how this changes the equation. There's some like fundamental issues here. And like talking to them, I'm like, it just feels like they're like us like two, three years ago, they're going to run into the same challenges. So that's why I feel a bit more confident. We're kind of like a bit more veteran and the team has kind of been through.

a whole cycle of multiple cycles at this point. We've kind of done it before. It's not our first radio.

<< Jason Kam (50:26) >>:

 And then, I guess just a bit more on the product itself, like listing and delisting of perps. Do you plan to be any different? And do you have a roadmap for stocks? I think Hype is trying to do that. And then they also have HyperUnit that is for spot deposits. Maybe on those three things, how do you think about those three aspects?

<< Tristan (50:50) >>:

Yeah, listing super important. I think this is actually I didn't touch on that in the go to market, but that is extremely critical. We saw I think it was a big reason why hyper liquid got a lot of attention in the early days. They did pre market stuff similar to the to the Aevo guys. I think that's just even though it didn't do a lot of volume. It's a great kind of top of funnel acquisition strategy, bring new people into the platform who kind of want to get into these new markets. And funnily enough, you actually saw innovation leading on the dex is right.

then Bybit started copying it, then Gate started doing pre-market stuff.  So was good, they were kind of on the bleeding edge there. And so for us, that was a bit harder to do on our previous product, because getting the kind of Oracle feeds, putting that all on chain, setting up a market, probably would take us a day roughly, like turn around. It was a bit of a painful process with a few moving parts.  But with the new model that we have, the Oracle setup, we're working with the Pyth guys on that.

They have a new Oracle essentially which they can spin up a lot faster. So we're hoping, or like my internal SLAs, we want to get these new listings out in a couple of hours. If we're taking too long, we've kind of failed there. I think that's really important.  I think your other question was essentially on bridging hyperunit stuff, if I'm not mistaken.

<< Jason Kam (52:02) >>:

Yeah,

 the spot trading on hyperliquid itself through hyperunit. Yeah, the custody. Yeah.

<< Tristan (52:06) >>:

Yep. Yep.

So yeah, we will have spot trading as well. That's pretty much mostly built, but just kind of like putting the finding final touches on it.  We think that's pretty important. And it's also a fundamental component of our kind of unified trading account.  We kind of took some notes from essentially  how Bybit had done there is we think they have a really good system and this allows for

kind of collateralizing your positions, not just in USDC like Hyperliquid does, but in Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, Jito, Sol, whatever it might be. This is like a really nice feature that people have.  This kind of unlocks the whole lending side as well as the spot trading side. So it's kind of this nice trifecta of products there. And like I said, getting the bridging experience really good is super important to us. So we're focusing on making that very fast and painless. On top of that,

Yeah, I think a big draw for HyperUnit is this like native Bitcoin angle. I think there's like a lot of TVL there. Actually, I'll kind of one of our kind of like,  BD guys, actually really been pushing this on me is like, we need native Bitcoin. And I've been talking a bunch to the Zeus network guys who have ZBTC on Solana. I'm very good friends with with the CTO there. He basically, it re implemented the Bitcoin virtual machine in like Solana smart contracts in the SVM, which is just like

crazy smart stuff, but yeah, he said basically he looked at hyper units modeling. He's like, yeah, threshold signature scheme. can do something. Basically our product is pretty much comparable with them on the Solana side, which is good.

<< Jason Kam (53:35) >>:

 Interesting. Okay. Well, good luck on the launch, I guess.  then if you do get the buy-in and the shifting of volume and people kind of get the sense of the token incentive, like it should just kind of work, assuming the product itself stands up.  And then onto the product.  Zeta would do a one-to-one mapping and migration of the $ZEX token to the $BULLET token. Can you walk me through how you think about that?

<< Tristan (54:04) >>:

Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, I mean, we had already launched a token. I guess now that we've done this rebrand, we have a much more grand vision in terms of what we're building with the whole network extension for Solana and really trying to take on bigger market share.  We thought it was important, I guess, to reflect that and essentially the token, it's going to have much more refreshed utility, which is going to be much stronger. So using that in the actual.

Proven network potentially is the gas token, giving trading fee rebates essentially is like a very standard exchange feature. Some of the kind of a revenue  kind of all value accrual mechanisms, which will go through essentially like a fee switch decision. All those we think is much better.  And yet we didn't want to launch a second token because I think it's a lot to manage. I think it's also like probably not best faith. So we decided to simulate to how it.

taking the product and moving it all over into the bullet stuff. We're gonna do the same for the token essentially. We already have a bunch of people, we have almost 35,000 holders, so that's really nice. We initially with the token had a year cliff essentially, so we didn't want any investors or team or anyone else unlocking before then. We wanted a full year to get it out to community, get as much distribution, as many holders. We had about 15,000 stakers as well, which is pretty nice, those people that have locked up essentially for.

for a couple of years. it's kind of gotten out there in the community. I think especially we've had a lot more kind of a buy interest recently, which is great. And so I think that's kind of a nice base and anyone I think who wanted to not support the project and like exit during that kind of bear market period or over the last year had the opportunity to. I think we have quite a strong holder base now. And so we're gonna be doing a one-to-one token conversion. We think that this is probably the most fair thing to do.

for the people that have been supporting us since the early days. It's that will happen essentially around the time that we do the TGE for the new token. We'll just have some essentially like conversion portal. People can go in there and they'll have a period of time essentially post TGE to be able to convert their tokens into the new token.

<< Jason Kam (56:13) >>:

This happens after mainnet

<< Tristan (56:15) >>:

Yes, yes, that's correct. So yeah, like very fundamentally, and this is an important  point to mention as well. A lot of people have been bringing up the point that like, investors, it's like we're coming up on a year investors must be unlocking, there's going to be this like supply shock or like overhead. We actually did something which is we basically reached out to all our investors and like obviously chatted with our team.

We negotiated with all of them. We want to basically push out vesting until TGE. We don't want to have any of this supply overhang before the token comes out. And fundamentally, like you said, I want the mainnet to come out. I want it to be successful. I want to get traction on that. And we don't basically deserve any tokens until we can kind hit those milestones. So that's why we've decided to push all the vesting out until the new token comes out.

<< Jason Kam (56:59) >>:

immediately or maybe there's still a time lag between the TGE itself and sort of maybe like a month, three months or so after they can start clipping.

<< Tristan (57:06) >>:

Yeah,

potentially there might be a little bit. Yeah, we're still kind of deciding on the exact details, but we will do the thing that I think maximizes the benefit for community essentially. We want to get people in on the ground floor. We don't want to have any kind of like negative externalities.

<< Jason Kam (57:19) >>:

Yeah.

Is there more tokens granted like when let's say if if land to AAVE a there's like this additional 20 30 % portion for additional like is there anything like that or no?

<< Tristan (57:33) >>:

No, it's just one for one at the moment. Yeah, we're just keeping it simple.

<< Jason Kam (57:37) >>:

Do you expect all of the flow to convert over or do you think some is already lost? Maybe like 80 % conversion rate.

<< Tristan (57:44) >>:

It's a good question. Yeah, I'd probably go with something similar to that. To be honest, we had a claims mechanism for our original airdrop after the whole point system and I think 80 to 90 % roughly was claimed. there was a bit that people either forgot about or I don't know what kind of happened there. guess people churned out of crypto as well, to be honest, through the bull and the bear cycle. So I imagine probably a similar kind of conversion rate will happen there, but very hard to say.

<< Jason Kam (57:48) >>:

Yeah.

Yeah, and then it would seem like you're strongly intending to  copy or not copy stuck the wrong word, like learn from what really work well with hyperliquid with especially the fee induced buy and burn. And looking at your FDV of two, three hundred million today with like a thirty, forty million dollars circulating. If you your target, a 50 to 100 million cash flow every year.

fully dedicated towards burn will have a huge impact, obviously.  I guess, how should we think about the decision being made about the buy and burn of most of that cash flow?

<< Tristan (58:50) >>:

What's your question specifically?

<< Jason Kam (58:52) >>:

Like, are you going to decide it? It's going to be like  a pretention of voting by the community. But like, it's really just investors like us voting say yes. And then like the burn starts because I think Jeff just decided like the AF just kind of started buying and burning. Well, not not burning, but like they're just buying but locking it up. I suppose nothing stops you from doing the exact same thing without any sort of token holder approval.

<< Tristan (59:14) >>:

Yeah, I mean, we want to try and

avoid any like it's not it's not a like, we don't want to make like kind of these centralized decisions. And we also want to basically do stuff that's in the benefit of the protocol and work with community. So that would definitely be something that goes down to a vote. I think we want to model out the numbers as well. And there's like a good bunch of people who've been early supporters who I think have like good quantitative understanding and expertise who have kind of modeled out a bunch of this kind of stuff. So we definitely want to get their input essentially on what numbers make sense, you know, how aggressively we should pursue this and

the right parameters. But I think there's a ton of interest. I don't imagine there will be pushback from the community on this. think most people will be generally on board. I think you've seen similar things like Jup, think also announced their kind of buyback thing a couple of months ago. I think overwhelmingly positive kind of feedback and push from the community to have such a mechanism. This is true.

<< Jason Kam (00:02) >>:

Yeah, but that's not 97 % see here that Tristan

I was strongly advocate for like almost all of it And I think it will be a huge impact. Yeah

<< Tristan (00:10) >>:

that's internally.

Yeah, I don't want to commit to an exact number. But yeah, our goal off the bat is to  recycle or reinvest as much as possible into the community and into the growth of the exchange. We think this is very important. Like we need to be doing this off the bat and for probably the next couple of years to really grow. Because I think the market share in the pie is going to get really big. And I think, ⁓ yeah, it's just not conducive or we're not in a rush to like

take profits or stuff like that. We really want to give that back to community and having that flywheel and starting that flywheel, something that Hyperliquid did very well. They're basically giving back almost 100%. They never raised any VC funds. All these kinds of things make a lot of sense and that's how you win community sentiment to be honest. And I think if you're looking at some of our other competitors on Solana then they're not doing that. They're kind of probably taking a bunch of profits themselves centrally. They're relying on...

Grants, essentially, they're raising huge rounds from VCs, so we definitely want to take the more community-oriented approach.

<< Jason Kam (01:01:10) >>:

Got it. And  when should we expect something like that to be public for everybody to vote on or sort of at least observe?

<< Tristan (01:01:18) >>:

Good question. I mean, it would definitely need to be, I would like to have it pre TGE. So I imagine the next couple of months, it's something that I'm like now thinking a lot about.  Definitely by like end of the year, I would like to accelerate that. And it's such like a important catalyst. I want to start that conversation early, get people excited, get a bunch of input as early as possible.

<< Jason Kam (01:01:25) >>:

wow, okay.

Yeah, I know we're running out of time. Maybe just like one or two last questions.  You've raised about 13.5 million historically through two rounds of fundraising.  Do you have an equity entity or will kind of all future value accrual go to the token and how much of that treasury is left?  I guess you have to fund yourself through your own token portion, you know, just kind of walk me through all of that.

<< Tristan (01:02:02) >>:

Yeah, sounds good. We've only done  kind of token sales and raises and everything's around the token. We kind of don't have that equity structure, essentially.  In terms of, yeah, our raise, I think it was around $13 to $14 million, like you mentioned. That's put us in a pretty good position. We raised 21, 22, essentially,  in kind of that bull market phase of Solana that kind of carried us through. We did a smaller, essentially, like...

friends and family or like angel raise essentially like Anatoly, bunch of other people  last year, which was kind of nice to just get a bunch of the Solana builders in.  But generally we're in a very strong financial position. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. There was like a much smaller round though, it was just kind of like an angel thing.  But yeah, we're in a pretty strong financial position. We have over two years of runway, we're pretty comfy, we're like relatively lean teams and we don't have like massive kind of  operating expenses, which is pretty nice.

<< Jason Kam (01:02:37) >>:

last year.

<< Tristan (01:02:58) >>:

And yeah, we're kind of not going out there and necessarily doing any private deals, I would say at the moment, we think we're well capitalized, we have mainnet around the corner, there's a lot of really exciting releases for us.  So we want community to kind of get in the ground floor. We've seen a lot of people just essentially going out there and, kind of investing in secondary markets. And that's been working pretty well. And I think people have been pretty happy with that. We're always trying to improve the kind of on chain liquidity as well. Like literally last week, we tripled our on chain liquidity.

just working with market makers and kind of getting more capital in there because I think that's a really good way to go.  And if hyperliquid is any kind of example of that, it's really nice that it drove a bunch of people on chain to their exchange  to buy it as well. And I think looking ahead essentially like who are the comparables or things you could benchmark it to, I guess you've probably mentioned that there's like other kind of SVM L2's that kind of sitting at the, you know, 4-500 mil kind of FDV range. I think guys like

Sonic if you're looking at the perps vertical essentially this guy's like drift also at like four or five hundred mil essentially so I think market is already starting to rerate and price some of that stuff in I think there's still a bunch more breathing room potential and then obviously hyper liquid is on an absolute tear right now it kind of 40 to 45 so I think people can kind of do the moon math a bit and kind of look into that but yeah of course not financial advice but yeah we're not in a rush right now to raise I think

We have time on our hands. Essentially, our focus right now is getting Maynette out as soon as possible. And then if we need to really aggressively scale the team,  it's something that we can prioritize a bit further down the road.

<< Jason Kam (01:04:30) >>:

 Tristan, thank you for your time. Good luck on the execution.

<< Tristan (01:04:36) >>:

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

<< Jason Kam (01:04:38) >>:

Thank you.