Some news, I’ve officially wrapped up my time as growth lead at @ellipsis_labs after nearly 3 years. Joining the early team of 5 gave me the opportunity to wear many hats, touching different areas of the business. From recruiting & ops, to leading BD, growth, and marketing through multiple successful product launches on Solana. A special thank you to @0xShitTrader for the mentorship across these different areas, and @jarxiao for seeding my technical knowledge.🤍 It’s been incredible to build, grow, and learn alongside top talent as we scaled from a team of 5 to company of 28. The best is still ahead for Ellipsis Labs and @PhoenixTrade. Excited for what’s next.

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.

Big week

Agree

the only thing SF has on New York is philz coffee

let me out of my longs i dont even want a profit ill do anything

Performative vibe coding on my flight to SF

Extremely bearish on mobile gaming, I think the industry as a whole will go straight to zero Short-form content and scrolling is taking over brain space; no one wants to play phone games anymore

One of our goated engineers whipped this up for fun, to one click trade without filling out an order form You can just build things

Day 2 of brining my cat to work and seeing if anyone notices

Drinking hot coffee with a straw because I’d rather consume microplastics than stain my teeth

We’re linking up with @MeteoraAG during the Digital Asset Summit in New York next week! @0xsoju, @0xShitTrader, and others will dig into where DeFi and policy are headed. Join the conversation and stay for drinks after. RSVP below.

The whole world will trade on Phoenix.

Bring your cat to work day

The tech is important, but users don't care about tech. They want a product that works well. How it works doesn't really matter Regardless, we solved some really difficult (and cool) problems building perps on-chain on Solana to make @PhoenixTrade work well for users

Five new markets just went live. You can now trade DOGE, AAVE, SUI, ZEC, and BNB perpetuals with 10x leverage on Phoenix.

View on Orb instead of view on Solscan is the 2026 explorer standard

6 years since the genesis block, 3 years in the ecosystem. Solana changed crypto forever with performance that made it possible for powerful and complex programs to operate completely on a blockchain. Working alongside and learning from the brilliant minds in this ecosystem has been the best place to grow.✨