Vladimir Novakovski on Why Lighter Is Built for the Future of Finance

**Robbie** (0:00)
Questions to love, man. Vlad, welcome to the show, man, how are you?

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:03)
Thanks, Andy, good to be here.

**Robbie** (0:06)
Happy Friday to you.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:08)
Yes, although I feel like in these markets, there's no, you know, every day is kind of the same, you know, so much going on.

**Robbie** (0:16)
It is the end of the crypto winter, Vlad. Good to have you, man. Catch us up, man. What is the latest with Lighter? How has the last couple months been post-token launch? I know you guys have been shipping a ton.
We'd love to just get a quick lay of the land as to what's happening over there in the Lighterverse.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:33)
Sure. Yeah, we, you're right. We have been shipping a lot of different things. I think one big initiative that's coming up is the Lighter EVM, which we did kind of a technical deep dive on last week. What that will ultimately allow is kind of any Ethereum developer could launch, you know, apps directly on Lighter. So for somebody who's not building something that requires kind of the high throughput of our customized circuits that, you know, allow high-frequency trading, like let's say you're building a prediction market or you're building a lending platform or bridging, like you can actually just deploy that directly on Lighter, and that would allow you to interact with the liquidity already on Lighter and the same balance sheet. So that's really exciting. You know, that's kind of in DevNet now. The other big things that are coming up are universal cross margin.
So kind of like right now, the only collateral you can use for trading perps on Lighter is USDC, and pretty soon we're going to have a whole system there where, you know, kind of any starting with the safest kind of ERC assets like ETH, but, you know, as well as the LLP, but like, you know, that will really improve capital efficiency where, because, you know, we're talking about perps, we're talking about spot and tokenized assets. Like, I think the bigger picture here is like for all of those to be traded from the same balance sheet and in a capital efficient way. So that's a big initiative for us as well as a bunch of other things, right? Like adding new assets, improving liquidity, you know, iterating on our mobile app, you know, the team is, you know, this is just still early days for us.

**Andy** (2:19)
Awesome. I'm curious what you're paying most attention to. Obviously, there's so much happening in the markets, but also you mentioned you're shipping tons of features. What are some of the most critical things that you have your eyes on as of late? Are you keeping tabs on macro? Are you heads down building? Do you really? Because from our perspective, it's like, okay, perps as a category does well when there's a lot of volatility in the market. And so are you paying attention to volatility in the market? You sort of heads down shipping.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (2:53)
Right. I mean, I think we're paying attention to it, to the extent that, you know, there are products that our customers want to trade and we want to make sure they have the right amount of liquidity to trade them, but also that the risk management engine works well. And, you know, there are no, you know, we don't want another, you know, 10-10 like event. So I mean, I think we are paying attention to volatility both from the point of view of the opportunity. You know, obviously there are a lot of folks who want to trade assets like crude oil right now. You know, we're doing, you know, that's not something that three months ago was necessarily like the thing that the market expected, but here we are. And so, you know, we have to make sure our customers have the liquidity to do that at the same time. We want to make sure that, you know, everything works in a stable way in terms of funding rates and the risk engine. But, you know, we're not, that being said, you know, most of our time is spent focusing on the bigger vision, right? Because there's, this is kind of, like ultimately, what we want to get to is a place where, you know, all of these assets that exist in TratFi are on chain and you can trade the spot and the perps in a secure and efficient way and kind of share the balance sheet across them. And that's a longer term vision. It takes, you know, time to get there. But right now is like the best time to do that between all the tech that's available, between kind of institutional, like final institutions actually get it. Like I think you mentioned previous guests from TratFi was talking about tokenization. I think a lot of folks we're talking to in TratFi really get it now and, you know, regulators get it as well. So this is like the perfect time to be building the future of finance. So that's our main focus. But yeah, if there are specific markets that our customers want to trade, you know, based on what's going on right now, we do pay attention to that.