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- [00:00]
Tristan Fritz
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Bryce Paul
Everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Crypto 101 podcast. I'm your host, Bryce Paul, and I am so excited for our next guest today. This is an incredible protocol, Zeta Markets, and the co founder, or sorry, the founder, the solo founder, Tristan Fritz of Zeta Markets. How are you doing today, Tristan?
- [00:33]
Tristan Fritz
Doing very well. Thanks for having me on the, on the platform.
- [00:36]
Bryce Paul
Yeah. I'm really excited to dive into everything you've been building at Zeta Markets. Before we dive into that, let's. Let's just get acquainted with the viewers. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up founding this protocol.
- [00:50]
Tristan Fritz
Yeah, absolutely. So I have kind of been around the crypto space for a couple of years now at this point. I got started in 2017, just kind of dabbling in crypto, as people do when, you know, you see bitcoin plastered everywhere and you think, what is this thing? I want to get in on it and understand what's happening. And so that kind of led me down the rabbit hole to actually exploring what cryptocurrencies there are there, how it kind of works. And I was lucky enough to kind of partner with one of my friends in the early days who would take over the finance side. And I kind of did more of the kind of engineering side of things and just writing bots and playing around with some of the exchanges that existed back in the day. So if people remember kind of these ancient exchanges like Bittrex and stuff like that for trading altcoins, you know. Yeah, Throwback, then obviously everyone got kind of rinsed, I think, in that, in that first wave when the market crashed. But the good thing was it kind of, it let this, this kind of spark in me to kind of understand what was happening under the hood. So I ended up taking a bunch of final year courses at university around distributed systems. Learning to build your own kind of mock proof of work, blockchain, understanding how proof of stake works, stuff like that. So it was kind of nice to peer under the hood and be like, okay, this isn't just like price charts and trading. There's actually some technology happening there. And for me, finishing a degree in computer science, I was like, okay, there's something interesting and something good here. So I took a bit of a hiatus from that. I went and got a real job and worked in kind of machine learning for a couple of years, which was super interesting. So way before a lot of this generative AI stuff was, was popping off. And so I did that in Silicon Valley for a couple of years, which Was a pretty fun experience working in a bigger company and working on these like pretty cutting edge problems for millions of customers. And then certain point where yeah like Covid hit and it was kind of a little bit like depressing I guess doing remote work and stuff like that. And at that point I just kind of had this real itch to do a startup. I'd worked in a couple of early startups, but never as a founder. And I thought this is the perfect opportunity to just kind of roll the dice and give it a shot. And that was off the back of essentially Defi. Summer had happened, all these kind of smart contract protocols had popped up. People had dexes and lending markets and all this crazy stuff on Ethereum. And I was like, wow, this is very cool. Anyone can deploy this permissionless contract. I read the Uniswap contract and it was like 70 lines of code and it wasn't terribly sophisticated and the thing did like a billion dollars of volume a day. I was like, wow, this is kind of mind blowing that someone can just deploy a market like this and have so much success. And so that kind of led us down that route. We ended up just brainstorming, you know, we were just kind of like, you know, we work whiteboarding stuff and we're just like what can we build in Defi that'd be really impactful. So we looked through like under collateralized lending which was like very hard. And then we ended up settling on options because one of my kind of ex co founders at the time was a was an options trader. And so we built this options platform for two years. It was relatively competitive and we kind of gave some of the CEFI guys a little bit of a run for their money on some of the altcoin options markets for a period of time. But very complicated product as you imagine with the meme coin that we have now. Trying to understand calculus and partial differential equations and all this kind of stuff. Options is very complicated. You need quant finance background. And so we couldn't find the liquidity that we wanted firstly, which is hard to come by in Defi and the product market fit. I think it was just too complicated for the audience. So at the time that FTX collapsed, we pivoted fully to perps. We were already kind of like building up the futures trading side on our end and we were just like, let's go for a simpler product. Something that people get where you can go long, short, do it with leverage. And that's been kind of our cornerstone product I guess for the last Two years, essentially. And so we made the very early bet to build on Solana. That was like not the cool thing back in the day. It was very controversial. I remember a lot of people, you'd go to Ethan and they'd be like, why are you building on this thing? Move to Arbitrum, you know, you silly. And then, yeah, it was kind of cool going into 2024, you know, the thing just within a couple of months, sentiment completely flips. Everyone is mega long. Solana. Solana goes on an absolute tear. And suddenly, like, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of users pour into the ecosystem and, you know, we get like a big, big tick up in usage and adoption. That was like a really fun period of time, essentially, where we built this exchange throughout the bear market. And suddenly the adoption was. Was really picking up. And we got to where we are today with having quite a lot of users and experience in what it's like to run an exchange with a lot of volume. So we got to eventually $15 billion of volume, which was pretty cool. And now that we've kind of tapped out some of our limits on Solana, we're actually kind of building a new version of our product and we can kind of get into that bit later in the podcast.
- [05:42]
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- [07:43]
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- [07:47]
Tristan Fritz
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- [07:48]
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- [08:14]
Bryce Paul
Lot to unpack there and you definitely want to get into that. But going back to, you know, you guys stuck around the Solana Bear market and I was around trust I've been around through many bull and bear markets. The Solana Bear market post ftx. Oh, one of the nastiest bear markets I ever seen. I, I even, you know, I, I went even on record on a live stream, you know sometime back that I said it's, it's done. Solana can't come back from this. It was too intertwined with Sam Bankman Freed and so on. There were so many people that left the space and I want to get into your head. You were building this protocol. You were like, you know, your whole life probably got turned upside down when that whole thing happened. But what, what made you stay on Solana basically.
- [09:01]
Tristan Fritz
Great question. Yeah, it was a very tough period. I don't know how it compares to some of the other bear markets because I wasn't a builder at those times. But, you know, only observing from like an outside perspective is pretty rough. And then being a builder and having your whole future of your, I guess, career and company kind of bet on this was pretty hard, especially when everyone is kind of against it. Essentially everyone was like, eth is the thing, Solana is going to die out. You know, Kyle is wrong, it's the next eos, all this kind of stuff here. But for me it was very clear, despite what happened with ftx and there was some ties, I guess in the early days, nothing fundamentally changed about the fundamentals of the network. It was still fast, it was still cheap, we could still build banger applications on it. And we did a bit of a survey, I guess, on should we move our product to a different chain? Which I think is a reasonable and sane thing to do if, know, your company and all your employees, you know, you don't want to kind of go down with the ship. At the same time, I had a lot of conviction for Solana and we ended up kind of looking at a lot of these other chains, some of the new up and coming L1s, some of the L2s that were out there. And fundamentally we just came to the decision we can't build our product anywhere else. Like all the other chains are just too slow, too expensive, too fragmented in terms of the user experience. And so we were just like, yeah, we, we just can't build this anywhere else. So we decided to double down. We decided to rebuild things and kind of take a bet on the market, becoming rational and understanding that Solana was underpriced and this thing is maybe, maybe going a bit too far, getting, you know, sold down to $8 and everyone kind of leaving. So we made a bit of a ballsy bet there and like, you know, who knows, it might not have paid off and I might have screwed everything up. But thankfully I was, I was right on that. And it was good to see that things came back in a, in a really big way. And in fact, the bear market was somewhat of a blessing because it allowed us to just take some time to actually just go and like fix a lot of things, iron out bugs, make the performance a lot better. And so it was good over that period of like six months to a year. Towards the end of the bear market, we were actually just heads down, shipping like crazy. We were like, we refactored our back end, we just like made things a lot snappier and we got the platform into a place where it could actually scale to, you know, a couple hundred thousand users, which is pretty nice. And so when all these like big airdrop season happened on Solana, that's when it went from like no app had any users to every app had like basically like a million users. And so I was just watching out chart of usage. I remember, I don't know if it was In January, the G2 airdrop, it just happened and we just got like 30,000 users overnight. And it was just kind of ridiculous and it like broke our order book I think. So I had to stay up until 2am and like put out some fix or something and then it was just kind of good. Like we'd stress test a lot of the infrastructure before then and then we kind of were in a good place where things could go up. So yeah, to answer your original question, I think the fundamentals didn't change. The network still worked very well and credit to Solana core, like they had all these outages and the chain would go down. I don't know if you remember all the time, but I don't think there's been a chain outage in either one or two years, which is very impressive. And so they actually put a lot of work into that, making a lot more stable, making it usable for people, which is just like, I don't know, complete paradigm shift. And then the other thing I think is just the ecosystem and the people in it were really good. Like there's, I don't know like how to describe it, but the people are pretty die hard in Solana. Like the core group of protocols that I know.
- [12:30]
Bryce Paul
Pretty culty.
- [12:32]
Tristan Fritz
Yeah, yeah, a little bit culty, but in a good way. Like people really love the chain and they're like, no matter what, we're going to build things and we're going to build products that users love. The thing I didn't really like back in the day was these kind of multi chain apps. They're like, oh, there's new protocol coming out. Like oh, blast is like a new chain. We're going to deploy our app on 20 different chains. And it was like every new chain that would come out there would be like a new deployment. And I was like, this doesn't feel like what a successful Web2 company would do. Just try and deploy their thing everywhere and do these copycats had protocols. You really want to like double, triple down on one opportunity and do something really good and really groundbreaking. And so there was this kind of meme of there's like only 75 devs left in Solana and it didn't kind of feel like that at the time. Like, I remember I'd get on the Solana ecosystem calls that Ben from Foundation would run and it would just be like all the defi guys and there'd be like, I don't know, 20 or 30 people. And everyone was like a little bit, you know, a little bit depressed. It's just like talking about stuff and it's like, where's the liquidity? Where are the users? And we'd just be chatting about these things. But the good thing is like everyone was like, even though it sucked in the moment, everyone was like, kind of believe that at the end of the day we're going to make it through the other side. And so kind of having that optimism and just kind of, I guess like banding together a bit definitely helped I think get us all through.
- [13:51]
Bryce Paul
Yeah, I mean, totally. I mean, from our end we were still churning out a couple episodes a week, bull or bear market. And it was great just to see, you know, guys and gals like you, I mean, who were, who were just building, rain or shine, no matter what was going on, they were like, yeah, like prices are down, but we're still gonna keep growing. And it's cool to see them succeed now and have, you know, large market caps, 50 million dollar market cap, 100 million, whatever it is. And like, yeah, we're just getting started. By the way, this is, you know, probably the, the near term low for where we're going to be. You know, all of our internals and metrics continue to grow. So yeah, we're really excited about what you guys are building. And you know, we haven't really dove so far. You know, we've been chatting for, for 10 minutes. We haven't really dove too deep into the technicals of what you're building. So it's, it's an order book decks where you could trade, I think 100x leverage maybe. Tell us a little bit about the mission for Zeta Markets and where you kind of meet your users.
- [14:54]
Tristan Fritz
Sounds good. That's a great question. So we are very pro defy and we want to build an exchange essentially that democratizes trading and financial markets of people. I think if you look in traditional finance, it's like typically a lot of these services are not available to, you know, people generally. Like, I don't know, just, just look at how the landscape is. Like a lot of people can't access different markets, you know, apps like Robinhood or maybe like us only some people kind of derivatives market, some people can't touch, you know, crypto markets. Like it's kind of a fragmented industry and I think fundamentally it's the nice thing with crypto is it's like the great equalizer. Anyone with an Internet connection can basically become banked and have access to financial markets.
- [15:38]
Bryce Paul
Yeah. For anywhere in the world. For virtually no cost too. Right.
- [15:42]
Tristan Fritz
Yeah. Which is, which is incredible. And I think what I really like about Defi as well and a big reason why I started it is because I come from more of a tech background. Like we have a lot of people on the team with like finance and HFT backgrounds but fundamentally like I came from working on you know or like experiencing a lot of the open source boom in the AI industry, you know with like large language models, computer vision, all this kind of stuff that really like drove innovation forward. You come to finance, it's all walled gardens. Everyone has their own proprietary systems. You know, there's kind of middleman middlemen everywhere who charge their own scarcity mindset. Nobody shares like Swift and these banking networks. I feel like just kind of, I don't know even like these new fintechs coming out I'm sure like PayPal or some of these like neo banks essentially they're still using the legacy financial kind of banking system and they're just kind of like a nice user interface over the top of them. But still like cross border transactions take multiple days. The fees are kind of ridiculous. I kind of experience a lot of this. So the beauty with Defi is like no middleman. The whole exchange stack for us is just compressed into basically one smart contract. You don't have to deal deal with like five different counterparties which is, which is really nice. So like ideally we'll get to a place where more accessible, the fees are lower essentially you know exactly what is happening. You know, it's not behind some kind of curtains or you know, behind some kind of FTX entity where who knows what they're doing with your money. Everything is self custody. People earn their own funds and then we're a true believer that yeah like markets are going to be driving I guess you know, that's where price discovery is going to happen and we want to be bringing that on chain. Currently I think it's happening a lot on centralized exchanges which is, which is okay I guess those guys have the liquidity and have the infrastructure that Defi hasn't quite got yet. But I Think we want to get to a place where we get the best of both worlds. People self custody things, they have the transparency of what's happening on chain. Everything is kind of able to be verified at the same time they're getting very good liquidity, very good user experience. And that's essentially what we're building or we've always wanted to build with our exchange. That's why we build on Solana because we tried to build on Ethereum, it was too slow. The fees were like massively high. You could only get very, very like wide spreads on some of the, on the markets. And I was like, hey, this, this is just not going to work right? Like no one's going to trade this seriously. No one cares about I guess that level of true decentralization that much that they're willing to pay, you know, 1 to 5% in spreads and you know, huge gas fees. Like it just doesn't make any practical sense. So Solana was good. You're starting to pay a fraction of a cent in kind of gas fees. Things are pretty efficient. But it's still kind of hard to rival centralized exchanges who just have completely centralized stack. The beauty is now with I think people building more custom infrastructure, you've seen obviously with hyper liquid building their own layer one, they're actually pretty competitive with centralized exchanges. And that's been like an interesting point to note for us is like people really care about that, that experience and they really want to have the performance and they don't want to compromise essentially, essentially on the user experience there. So that kind of led us to move from building a fully, fully on chain Dex on Solana, where everything is in the smart contract where you kind of are bottlenecked by the 400 millisecond block times you have to deal with the congestion and priority fees of Solana which are a bit finicky. Now we've essentially got a setup where we're building the first network extension on Solana. So this is basically a roll up. If you're familiar with the kind of Ethereum space, how people build rollups, we're kind of taking a lot of the design inspiration from that and we're building that on top of Solana. Why are we doing that? It lets us get a ton more throughput and performance. It gets us a lot more reliability, gets us this kind of like live transaction model where everything is happening in real time. I think if you've seen chains like Mega Eth, which claim to be this kind of real time blockchain, we have A very, very similar concept, which is pretty cool, to kind of give the rundown on that. We take the execution off chain. So instead of running all the kind of.
- [19:39]
Coin Flip Ad
Is that called Bullet?
- [19:41]
Tristan Fritz
Yes, yes, that's right. We call that Bullet and Zeta. Our exchange is going to be kind of like the first application that we deploy on that. Eventually we're going to open up to many more applications. But at the moment it's kind of like we're kind of dogfooding our own product. Right. It's like we need the infrastructure for the exchange to scale. So that's kind of why we're building it. And it's kind of this good symbiotic relationship in that we don't just build infra in a vacuum for. For the sake of it. We're building this thing to kind of service our own need. And so some of the stats on that we're able to get up to where we're targeting 10,000 transactions per second, which is pretty nice. More importantly, we're getting latencies down really low. So currently on Solana it's 400 milliseconds, but it can take a few slots to get included. That tends to be a bit too slow for high frequency trading or any kind of like price discovery. So we've got it down to somewhere between 2 to 5 milliseconds, which is pretty nice. So almost like 100x improvement there. And we think that helps a lot with like providing liquidity. You're not always just getting armed versus Binance. The market makers have a much better time in providing very tight quotes, which is very good for people who come in and trade casually. And then we can do a lot of pretty nice stuff on the user experience side of things. So typically when you trade on a Dex, the wallet modal pops up every time you have to sign a transaction. You might see a really good price and you need to refresh a little bit painful. And a lot of the pro traders come to our platform, they're like, man, this is just like not that enjoyable or like a little bit painful for me. So it's really nice. We can do wallet abstraction on Bullet, which is pretty nice. So people can come in, they can like create a session key and they can basically sign by just like, you know, clicking on the interface and not having to explicitly sign every message, which is pretty nice. There's a lot of benefits. And basically where we're trying to get to is something that feels or doesn't compromise versus a centralized exchange on performance, but is fundamentally better in terms of every piece of. The logic of the matching engine is verifiable. So we work with risk zero and succinct teams. They've built this really cool piece of tech called the ZK vm. It means that we can write our Rust code and they can emit ZK proofs. We can post them on Solana. Anyone can verify them. So, wow, it's pretty nice that. Yeah, we run this order book very fast. We can take all the results of it, we can prove everything. We can set a lot on Solana. Anyone can go verify it. So it's kind of nice you don't have that level of transparency on, I think, major centralized exchanges today.
- [22:05]
Bryce Paul
You certainly, I mean, yeah, certainly don't. And I think that there's going to be a day maybe, I don't know, this could be wishful thinking, whereby like, the Dex volume completely overtakes, like by orders of magnitude the volume that happens on centralized exchanges. And I kind of want to get your thoughts on this, if you kind of agree or if you think that's kind of a little too optimistic. And I was going to say, I feel like I saw something like a tweet from Brian Armstrong about that, that they might even Coinbase might even have. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, for those who are listening who don't know, said that they might have their own decentralized exchange directly integrated into Coinbase so that people can have a choice.
- [22:50]
Tristan Fritz
It's a great question. I mean, I think there still will be a market for both. I think there are things that probably the centralized exchanges can do that people will need to get on board. Plus they also just have like, big kind of monopoly in the space right now. So it will take some years for things to change. But I am very like the whole future of the company. And what I care about doing is making this bet that I think DEFI will hold its own and at least get to kind of parity with centralized exchanges, if not kind of supersede them. And I think you're already seeing this happen. Like, this was not a thing a couple of years ago. Like, this was always my dream, essentially. But you would look at Dex volumes and there were maybe 5 to 10% of centralized exchanges. You know, it was a little bit pitiful, but you're seeing. Starting to see things flip. And, you know, I got to credit hyperliquid again and dydx and some of the others. They've done like a really good job in terms of just kind of pushing the frontier there. And now we're seeing actually, yeah, there's actually quite a lot of dominance I think from some of these Dexes. They're doing pretty well. I think it was really cool actually. I think with the Trump launch, the Dex are the ones that managed to launch it before any of the centralized exchanges because they're just like more agile, you can potentially do permissionless listings or they can just get things out quicker. And the open interest was actually the highest on the Dexes within the first couple of days, which I think was super impressive. Most of the volumes are going through there. So it's kind of a trend that I see happening and I think the block and other ones have these kind of charts on, on Dex versus centralized exchange volume, market share and it's, it's trending up I think pretty strongly and I think like you mentioned Brian Armstrong talking about it, they're investing into base. I think it's a big part of their strategy. That's what people are hoping, right. It's like Coinbase has this captive audience. They bring the kind of DEFI portal in there, bring it into Coinbase. They have millions. I don't know how many users they have, you know, probably like I think almost 60.
- [24:43]
Bryce Paul
Yeah, maybe or yeah, maybe almost a hundred actually.
- [24:46]
Tristan Fritz
Yeah, kind of ridiculous. And then I think you saw other ones like Ben, the CEO of Bybit has been talking about essentially how, you know, he, he reckons DEFI indexes of the future, they're obviously got mantle their own chain, they're investing more into this kind of stuff. So I think you're seeing pretty much every centralized exchange these days, who knows what's up is launching their own chain and trying to launch their own Dexes. I am just pretty bullish that it's the Defi teams that are the small hungry teams, you know, like us and some other ones that are like 10 or 20 really hardworking people that are going to be able to like basically like out navigate these thousand person organizations. And we've been around Defi for many years. We know the internals of Solana or Ethereum or whatever chain it might be and I think we can just move really fast and kind of ship these things and react to the market. So I'm kind of bullish on the startups there to kind of start eating away market share and I think there's a few really strong competitors in the space there.
- [25:39]
Bryce Paul
Yeah, wow. I just looked it up. Coinbase, 73 million users, which is pretty impressive.
- [25:47]
Tristan Fritz
That is an AI DeX had some fraction of that. They would Be they would be loving it.
- [25:52]
Bryce Paul
That is pretty crazy. No, I was going to say. So I want to take a look here while we still have you on the ZEX token, the ZX Zeta Markets token. Tell us a little bit about this. What was the genesis of it and how is it kind of utilized in the ecosystem?
- [26:10]
Tristan Fritz
Yeah, yeah, so we kind of launched it middle of last year I guess been like a long time coming. And so people who traded on the platform, essentially we were, you know, able to grant some tokens to people who traded long term on the platform. So we ran essentially like a points program which is pretty successful. Got a lot of people in the door and then people were able to essentially claim and stake tokens. Staking tokens essentially help people with fee discounts as well as there was kind of staking rewards that we put out. So people who continue to trade on the platform and we have a good contingent of people who continue trading on the platform and they can kind of earn rewards from there, which is pretty nice. And then in future we are looking to revamp the tokenomics. I can't share too much at the moment, but there's exciting stuff given we are kind of moving to this roll up model. There's kind of like a lot of node operations and other kind of security and integrity of the network that will be used with the token. So we're kind of developing that as things go and so yeah, we're trying to flesh out the tokenomics a bit more and I think to the extent that they can kind of benefit the network and we can kind of get some exciting stuff going, that's basically what we're heads down building up. So I will have more to share on that in the next couple of months for sure.
- [27:26]
Bryce Paul
And I'm curious, you know, you're, you're a DEFI founder. I want to get your thoughts on the changing regulatory environment. The climate was pretty cold under the Biden administration with Gensler and, and you know, his goonies. How do you feel about the sort of changing environment and opening up the possibility to Zeta Markets and many of your other colleagues and stuff to accessing, you know, the US retail market and, and not having to geofence everybody out?
- [27:57]
Tristan Fritz
Yeah, it's a good question. There's only so much I can comment on this. But yeah, essentially from our perspective we've always been very kind of compliant on that end. We've had to geofence the US since the inception of the platform essentially to kind of comply with the regulations there. And it has been Pretty hard working with the US Market. It's just been like completely off. Off the, off the table for us. Yeah. And yeah, it's interesting with the new administration, obviously there are some signs, you know, that seems to be warming up to what's happening in the, in the crypto sphere. You know, the President launching his own meme coin, I think was, was pretty interesting.
- [28:30]
Bryce Paul
I mean, that's World Liberty Financial, his own defi platform.
- [28:34]
Tristan Fritz
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And, you know, they're trying to campaign and, you know, get more crypto buy in, which is, which is good to see in the short term. This hasn't changed anything for us and we kind of just wait to see how kind of regulations adapt and hopefully they become more lenient, you know, at the moment, I guess it's like things take, you know, the wheels take a while to kind of kick off and get rolling. But I think things are looking more optimistic, at least from teams outside of ourselves. I think more people are kind of eyeing the US or kind of US founders, I think, more willing to stay. But yeah, we've always been outside the U.S. you know, where we're kind of mostly based in Asia Pacific and, and that's been our target market for the longest time. But, you know, I very much hope that the US can kind of sort their stuff out and start becoming a leader for D5, because I think they have a lot of the talent and a lot of the potential there.
- [29:26]
Bryce Paul
I'm with you. And I think even, you know, the, the administration wants that to happen too. It's just a matter of, of getting all the pieces in line. But it seems like there's been, you know, press conferences with, you know, David Sachs, who's the crypto and AI czar, talking about getting things in order. The SEC I just saw recently as well, said that they are repositioning 50 lawyers and staffers at the SEC away from the crypto enforcement division to other divisions. And so definitely see the, the ball breaking in that direction. So I think it'll be good. Excited about that. But yeah, I can't speculate too much. Just got to see how things kind of, you know, it's Washington D.C. anything could happen. We could be waiting four years and not see anything but crickets. But no, I'm excited about what you guys are building, and I feel like we, we all have a pretty good sense of it. Is there anything, though, that we didn't cover on Zeta Markets or maybe even on, you know, what's up coming that you want to make sure that we, we cover.
- [30:28]
Tristan Fritz
Yeah, I think the main thing is we got some exciting timelines coming up. Like the whole team has been heads down shipping super hard and we've been just trying to scare scale this thing up, you know, building your own chain and like a whole new version of your platform takes more time than you would expect I guess. But we are kind of getting to the head of that, which is nice. Most Exchange logic is built. We've been in kind of private beta testing with a bunch of our core users which has just been nice to like iron out a lot of issues and usability stuff. And I think the results are pretty promising where we're seeing pretty good performance and I'm quite confident that we can deliver something, something really good here. So the nice thing is we are on track for hopefully February as like a public test net. That's something that we're planning to go out with. So I'd like people to kind of keep in touch there. You know, we have a Twitter at Zeta Markets if you kind of want to follow that and wait for the kind of timelines there. We'll be rolling it out to people. We'll also be kind of announcing a bit of a test net competition with a good cash prize up there. So if people want to trade and kind of pit themselves against other people there, I think this good opportunity and you'll get it. Chance to experience, you know, how snappy this thing is, how reliable the trade execution is, you know, the leverage that we're able to kind of offer and then there's a good prize at the end of it. So I think that should be fun and then fingers crossed, you know, if that all goes well and is relatively smooth and we can kind of iron things out where we're hoping to be on track for mainnet end of Q1 or startup Q2. So things are coming pretty quickly. I'm very excited to get things out there because crypto doesn't sleep and we got to move quickly with the market and from what everyone. You know, I get DMS all the time. You know, when the market crashes, Solana gets congested. You know, a bunch of traders just ping me and they're just like, where is this platform? I need it. You know, I need like a really robust, reliable trading platform. And I want to be trading perps essentially on Solana. I don't want to have to like bridge out or use centralized exchanges again. So I think it's definitely solving a gap in the market and I'm very excited to deliver it.
- [32:22]
Bryce Paul
Man, I cannot wait. Tristan, look, I got one last question for you. It's something that, you know, it's a highly demanded question of all the, the folks that come onto our podcast that have any sort of, you know, finance or trading background. But it's basically just for, for somebody who's out there who might be even newer to trading, newer to crypto markets and, and this volatility from kind of an og, somebody who's been around the block, traded a lot of markets, what would just be a word of wisdom, a tip? Of course, not financial advice, but just a word of wisdom for our listeners.
- [32:58]
Tristan Fritz
Yeah, I think do your research in terms of the assets that you kind of invest into. I think ones that you have conviction or that you've kind of done proper research in, I think it's much easier to justify purchase of those. I think generally like I trade a lot of spot because I think those are kind of comfortable long term bets. I kind of alternate, I guess between my spot bags, things that I'm super long term bullish on. For example, Solana, not financial advice, but you know, like accumulated a bunch of that in the bear market and I kind of haven't needed to sell it. You can kind of hold that over very long multi year timeframes, which I think is really nice. And then I think for the people that are getting more into the derivative side of things, trading perhaps is, you know, can be really good. If you want to make targeted short term kind of bets. I think it's like very interesting. At the same time, I would encourage new users just to be like bit sparing with leverage. I think it's like an easy thing for people to go on, slide the slider all the way off and go crazy with it. But I think use it with caution. Typically from my experience, I only ever use kind of like 2, 3, you know, no more than kind of like 5x leverage typically because I think like the liquidation risk, especially with crypto markets so volatile. Like look, the other day the market crashed like I don't know, most alts down like 20%, you know, in a day. Oh yeah. Which is kind of ridiculous. So you know, unless you want to be staying up all night with trading view alerts and ruining your your sleep and being super stressed out about it, which you know, I did at some point in the past and it was not that fun. I think just like trade with with discretion. If you have this kind of short term intraday trades you have a lot of conviction on, you can kind of size up, but make sure you kind of monitor them and make sure you have alerts on so you kind of know when. When things are reaching breaking point. I would also suggest learning how take profit and stop loss orders work. Those are really important ones to make sure that you get out of positions if they kind of turn against you and you're kind of not able to monitor them. Um, but I think, yeah, all these risk measures just like, yeah, be smart about it. I think know that the, the risk that you're working with and yeah, hopefully we get to a big bull market this year and things go well.
- [34:56]
Bryce Paul
I like it. Yeah. Cheers to a big bull market. Let's. Let's hope it comes and. No, I, I appreciate that. That candid answer, especially from somebody who's, Who's. Who's operating and dealing lots of leverage, uh, to. To tell his customers and potentially anybody listening to use it sparingly and, and, you know, it's. It's a powerful tool. And again, it's built because I'm sure it's, you know, highly requested feature to, to go 100x, but just because you can take 100x doesn't mean you have to take 100x. So. No. Really excited, Tristan, for. For Zeta Markets. We'll put the links to the Twitter that you shouted out or the X in the show notes and we'll see you soon. Hopefully we have you back on when there's another big. Another big announcement.
- [35:41]
Tristan Fritz
Would love to. Thanks for the time. Really appreciate it.
- [35:43]
Bryce Paul
Yeah, likewise. Really enjoyed it and everybody at home listening, thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us. Check out the show notes, follow Tristan and Zeta Markets, and we'll see you back same time, same place next week with some more great guests. Take care.
- [36:09]
Tristan Fritz
Yeah, sure thing. Hey, you sold that car yet?
- [36:12]
Verizon Ad
Yeah, sold it to Carvana.
- [36:14]
Tristan Fritz
Oh, I thought you were selling to that guy.
- [36:17]
Verizon Ad
The guy who wanted to pay me in foreign currency, no interest, over 36 months. Yeah, no. Carvana gave me an offer in minutes, picked it up and paid me on the spot. It was so convenient.
- [36:29]
Tristan Fritz
Just like that. Yeah. No hassle? None. That is super convenient. Sell your car to Carvana and swap. Hassle for convenience. Pickup fees may apply.