Vladimir Novakovski: Lighter Bull Thesis For 2026 (What’s Changed)

**Andy** (0:00)
All right, guys, welcome back to The Rollup. We have a special recorded episode, podcast style, DeFi Slate 2022, The Rollup style with the lighter CEO, founder, Vladimir Novakovski. Vlad, welcome to The Tokenization Tower.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:16)
Awesome to be here. This is really, really special.

**Andy** (0:20)
Yeah, man, awesome.

**Robbie** (0:21)
Do you make it to New York much, or mostly just in town for the conference and doing the Trezor?

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:26)
Yeah, town for conference. I tried to come up here a couple of times a year, a lot of interesting partnerships going on with folks in Trezor these days. So I started out my career in Trezor, so it's always good to be back.

**Robbie** (0:42)
Feels good coming to crypto, still happy with that decision?

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:45)
Yeah, definitely. Well, it's interesting how now, and we saw this at the ETHConf events too, right? Like a lot of people in TradFi are really serious about blockchain, and it's not like just one person's pet project somewhere, but it's like the leadership of a lot of the biggest organizations is really serious about it.

**Andy** (1:10)
Yeah, man, they are. And I think they've caught, like, perps has caught their attention. Caoshi has just hit, I think, a billion dollars of volume on their onshore perp offering.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (1:22)
Yeah.

**Andy** (1:22)
You know, their CEO was on CNBC talking about it. I like, Vlad, where do you think we are in the market awareness for TradFi of, like, the idea of perps? Like, where do you think we kind of generally may be?

**Vladimir Novakovski** (1:37)
Yeah, well, there are a couple of aspects to that, right? There's just, like, the concept of a perp as a whole, then there's, like, what assets are the underlying assets, then there's, like, kind of what's most important to us is, like, having it be on chain. I mean, I think it's really great, and, you know, Tariq is a friend, and, you know, we're happy to see the big win they had with getting, kind of, the first license for perps.
And I think we always knew it was going to be kind of, you know, first, more of the centralized perps, and then decentralized. I think that's kind of the, sequentially makes a lot of sense. But, yeah, I mean, I think perps have definitely, if you talk to institutions, if you talk to, kind of, traditional exchanges, like, they're all thinking about their perp strategy, and it's, obviously, traders love it as well.

**Robbie** (2:36)
My question is, you know, you are talking to institutions, right? And they are deliberating their perpetual strategy. What is the elevator pitch of lighter or perps? Because we found that as institutions get into this space, typically, the way that some of these larger partnerships start is as an educator or kind of an advocate for a particular piece of technology or platform. Kind of get in. Maybe it takes months to years of helping an institutional team understand what this space is before they ultimately do kind of jump in. But once they do jump in, they typically do with the person or the company that they trust the most that help them understand the space as a whole. So does it start out educational? What is sort of your pitch or the lessons that you're teaching these institutions?

**Vladimir Novakovski** (3:26)
Yeah, I think that, surprisingly or pleasantly surprised that many of them already understand the basics.
So it's not, I think, I don't know, like if we have these conversations, like four or five years ago, it would have been like, okay, like what is this blockchain thing again? Like what's a token? Like now it's much more, okay, like we're talking about, like let's say the way lighter works, right? It's like we're on top of Ethereum, we post proofs every half hour. It's like, okay, well, maybe in some of the traditional institutions, they settle T plus one, right? Like one day out, like how would this infrastructure posting proofs work in that context? Like those are the kinds of conversations we're having. And yes, I mean, it is educational, but it's like, I think one or two levels deeper than just like, what is all this stuff about? You know, my CIO told me to look into this. It's like people who understand these details. It's like, okay, well, what's, you know, how many transactions per second, what's the cost? Like all this kind of stuff is really part of the conversation.

**Andy** (4:31)
Yeah. Yeah, man. I mean, I think that there is also this education gap for within the industry as well as it pertains to the different fee designs that we spoke about on our last show, on the trade-offs, on the designs. After our last show, though, you guys had an announcement. I think you guys had an X-spaces with Vitalik and just had this broader breakthrough on the ZK side that I'd like to get caught up on because I think that there's still a bit of a lack of understanding of the differences between the design of lighter and hyperliquid or variation or other purpose platforms and why lighter design specifically is extremely compelling from a risk perspective from a foreign on-chain user or for any allocator that wants to deposit capital into lighter. What was the ZK breakthrough that you guys had for the Escape Hatch or that kind of like emergency response? And then talk to us about like the design again, here operating from a security first perspective, right?