Vladimir Novakovski: The Rise of Perps In Mainstream Finance (Robinhood Partnership Explained)

**Robbie** (0:00)
Guys, welcome back to Tokenization Tower. I've got Vladimir Novakovski, the CEO and co-founder of Lightr. Vlad, welcome back to the Tower. Good to have you, man.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:07)
Great to be back.

**Robbie** (0:07)
Good to be here. You've been coming up to New York quite a bit. It's good to catch you again. Don't want to bury the lead here. Lightr and Perpetuals have been looking for a distribution wedge into consumer finance. And you guys have been able to create different partnerships and distribution venues for Lightr itself, now notably into this current partnership with Robinhood. Vlad, I know it's fresh off the press here. Talk to us about what this means for Lightr, how this came about and just kind of what's next for Lightr. And thanks for coming back.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:39)
Yeah, absolutely. Excited to dive into the news here with you guys and your audience. You know, I think we've had a history with Robinhood kind of going back to the early days of Robinhood when I was an early advisor to their team. And then the last year, they participated in kind of our last funding round before the token launch. But what we're really excited about now is kind of the first of what we see as like various partnerships we're going to do with them. But the first one is what's live now. And Leiter is the exclusive perpetual partner for Robinhood Wallet. So kind of for the self-custodial wallet that's accessible to Robinhood users kind of outside the US, you know, in jurisdictions where those use cases are possible right now.
We are the exclusive perpetual partner.

**Robbie** (1:43)
Yeah. I mean, when you think about distribution for Leiter, right, you think about new traders globally wanting access to 24-7 capital markets on chain, commodities, equities, crypto assets, the entire scale.
What does this distribution wedge mean for Leiter and for the growth of your user base?

**Vladimir Novakovski** (2:05)
Yeah. So one thing that's really interesting about this partnership is tokenized stocks that Robinhood has been working on for a while on their chain will now be collateral that traders could use on Leiter as part of kind of the purpose offering. I think we've talked in the past how tokenized stocks are on our roadmap, and with this partnership, these two pieces are going to come together. You know, the tokenized stocks and then purpose on various assets, from the crypto-native assets to equity, perps, commodity perps and so on. And this really opens up a whole other distribution channel, as you said, right? Like Robinhood has been the pioneer in retail trading for over a decade now. And it has really, I think we share a lot of common points as far as the emphasis on the best experience for the retail trader, right? Like lowest cost, best UI, best access to markets. And so we're really excited about this. I think this kind of opens up a whole other dimension to perps that a lot of people have never had access to and haven't even heard of perps, right?
I think the average Robinhood customer, to the extent right now, it's like those that can access the wallet product and down the road, it'll be expanded to other parts of the Robinhood stack, including customers in the US right now that are not able to use the wallet. But across the board, I mean, I think it's probably the strongest consumer brand in retail trading. And so we're very excited about it.

**Robbie** (3:59)
Yeah. And then from the Robinhood side, I'm sure they've seen the rise of perpetuals grow significantly over the coming, over the past years. And we had Chairman Mike Selig on CNBC a couple of weeks back talking about just the rise of perpetual futures in general. So the awareness curve is really, really growing here. When you think about Robinhood's perspective to this partnership, right?
What is it that this integration with lighter brings, right? Obviously, there's this perpetual futures offering in terms of the products and the assets that are tradable on lighter. But from Robinhood's perspective, they have their customers in mind, their user experience in mind, and wanting to build the best retail trading application. What is this integration? What is this partnership with lighter bring from their perspective? How does this impact their offerings?

**Vladimir Novakovski** (4:50)
Yeah, so a couple of things. I mean, I think that we've seen in a number of studies that we have kind of the lowest latency offering, which obviously consumers love.
We're able to work with partners at a lower cost structure than other competitors in the space, in part because of kind of how our technology scales. But I think another important part here, right, is like the Robinhood chain, which they've been hard at work on for the last year plus, is also an Ethereum L2, right? And so there's a lot of interoperability there. So I think the customers that have kind of collateral on Robinhood chain will directly use that as collateral for trading perpetual pairs on lighter. And I think that's really key as well. And I think as we expand the work we do with Robinhood going forward, there are ways to do that that will accrue value, not only to the lighter protocol, but also to the Robinhood chain. I think that's obviously synergistic with a lot of other things they're building outside of purpose and spot trading.