Vladimir Novakovski: Why Robinhood Chain And Lighter Both Bet On Ethereum (Composability Thesis)

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:00)
For us, the focus is really to build the most efficient way to trade the most liquid token. At a high level, something like this makes a lot of sense. These conversations like four or five years ago would have been like, okay, what is this blockchain thing again? Like, what's a token? There's some pockets of the industry that take this like very tribal. There have been a lot of bad actors in the past. The way Lighter works is like we're on top of Ethereum, we pull sprues. Every day we're processing hundreds of millions of orders and in volume that means multiple billion. I'm Vlad, co-founder and CEO of Lighter.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
Just like the streets of Manhattan, I'm gonna keep this quick. Over 70% of our viewers are not subscribers. Yes, you. Every week we interview some of the best entrepreneurs and investors in the financial industry. The easiest way to support our channel is to hit the like and smash the subscribe button. Now sit back, relax and enjoy today's show. Guys, welcome back to The Rollup. We're here with Vladimir Novakovski, the CEO of Lighter. Once again, Tokenization Tower. Vlad, good to have you back.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (0:57)
Good to be back.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:58)
Back in New York you are after a stunt in London with the Robinhood Flat Earth of Earth. The world is flat event. That's right. Yes.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (1:05)
Hop around the pond.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:08)
How was the event?
How was London? How was the whole, you know, announcement, official kind of perps, decks of the Robinhood wallet? Obviously Robinhood Chain's gotten out to a hot start. How was everything over there?

**Vladimir Novakovski** (1:22)
Yeah, well, you know, as I like to say, I think the other lot has more of a flair for the theatric than I do.
So it was a really fun event with kind of a unique theme there. And as one of our community members wrote after, like, you know, the death of London has been greatly exaggerated. It was a lot of fun to be there.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:45)
Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think the event, it felt like Robinhood's position in crypto and its amplification and its marketing has drastically increased. And, you know, we had you here with that announcement and partnership video just a couple of days prior. Obviously, that's gone live. Robinhood Chain is, you know, growing significantly. The instance of Lighter is starting to pick up liquidity, OI, volume, et cetera.
So it sounds like it was a really successful event.

**Vladimir Novakovski** (2:17)
Yeah, one funny thing about that event was, you know, there was the live demo of a trade, a perp trade on Robinhood Chain. And, you know, I think what's become kind of a meme now, you know, a lot of time have said, look at the speed on that, right? Which is kind of, our engineers were happy about that. But the funny part is that that was actually, the trade during the demo was actually the first trade ever done. Like 30 minutes before that, the system wasn't quite working. So it was like, you know, I think our team and the Robinhood team kind of took a gamble to actually show that live and it worked out.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:53)
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. And I mean, kind of looking holistically, Lighter has obviously grown significantly in the past several weeks to months, token wise, awareness wise, I think like the market's waking up to what you guys are doing. Since we last spoke, you guys also implemented some speed adjustments to the basically latency on the platform, new listings, maybe just catch us up the last two, three weeks.
What have been the biggest updates from the lighter side? What's been the core focus?

**Vladimir Novakovski** (3:26)
Yeah, a lot of kind of continuous improvements on the infrastructure side. As you said, we published a tech deep dive recently as well that kind of shows how the whole stack works. We actually have 3,000 Mac minis that are generating proofs that every single transaction that happened on lighter, and not only settle trades, but every order, every cancel, every liquidation, all of that is handled correctly and fairly to every participant. So there's like 3,000 Mac minis around the United States that are generating proofs of that as we speak. So we published that. I mean, I think also just like how we think about latency, how we think about costs, how the new instance is working. I mean, I think the metrics on that one are off to a great start.
I mean, I think overall Robinhood Chain is off to a great start, too. But for us, the big project going forward, as we've talked about before, is options. So that's going to open up a lot of opportunities like, for example, imagine options on pre-IPO stocks. Right? Because whether that stock is, even if the actual stock isn't traded actually yet, that doesn't mean the option couldn't be. And so you can actually have some, because it's just one thing to have a perp, which we have with that already, but for example, institutions that actually want to trade stocks and options, like they can't trade the pre-appealed stock, but imagine that they could trade a tokenized version of the option.