I don’t think anyone serious is arguing that RFQs replace orderbooks entirely. And nobody is crowning RFQs over orderbooks.
**Notice how Lucas drew a distinction in his response in the video below rather than call one model superior to the other.
CLOBs and RFQs optimise for different things and solve different market structure problems.
Orderbooks are excellent for native price discovery. Nobody disputes that. Hyperliquid and Lighter are fantastic examples of this.
But the bigger bottleneck for scaling global on-chain markets is not price discovery. It’s liquidity sourcing.
You cannot realistically bootstrap deep crypto-native orderbooks for every commodity, FX pair, index, equity basket, or global market. Fragmentation eventually becomes a problem.
That’s where RFQ architecture becomes powerful.
RFQs are designed to connect DeFi to existing liquidity rather than rebuilding every market from scratch. And ironically, many of the largest TradFi markets today, FX, bonds, OTC derivatives, and institutional block trading, are heavily RFQ-driven.
A smart RFQ system aggregating multiple liquidity sources can absolutely provide better effective execution in many situations.
And yes, “last look” concerns are valid, but that’s mostly in poorly designed RFQ systems.
Interestingly, even Lighter just announced “Lighter RFQ” specifically to handle large RWA positions with lower slippage and better pricing.
That alone should tell you that even strong CLOB systems eventually recognise that RFQ infrastructure becomes extremely useful once you start dealing with RWAs, larger size, fragmented liquidity, and TradFi-style execution.
So RFQs are not some “inferior fake market structure.”They solve a different problem.
The future is probably not RFQ vs CLOB.
It’s hybrid systems combining:
• price discovery
• smart routing
• aggregated liquidity
• institutional access
• efficient execution
We need to stop with this nonsense of crowning RFQs over Orderbooks.
I’ve written about this before but once more wanted to share
Orderbooks like Lighter are venue for Price Discovery; where the price is set. The price is based on supply and demand.
RFQ models like Variational is a venue for Price Taking. It literally copies the price from elsewhere; physically cannot offer better pricing than the venue it hedges on without taking directional risk.
Simple math: RFQ Price = Source Price Hedging Fees Profit.
Actually, Variational isn't even a competitor to Hyperliquid/ Lighter; it is a customer of them when you check deep.
There is also the Last Look problem:
- In orderbook: If you see a price and click buy, you get filled. The engine is neutral, in Lighter's case it's proved by ZK that you get the fill you intended.
- In RFQ: You request a price. The MM (or OLP) looks at your request, looks at the market, and then decides if they want to take the trade. If you are profitable, the RFQ engine can simply start rejecting your quotes, can delay them or giving you worse pricing.
So please stop crowning RFQs. Most they can become an aggregator of actual trading venues.