The Cat-and-Mouse game of Market Making w/ Rahul Jain
MAY 24, 202656 MIN
The Cat-and-Mouse game of Market Making w/ Rahul Jain
MAY 24, 202656 MIN
Description
Rahul Jain, Head of Trading at Ellipsis Labs, joins us to talk about the reality of market making on Solana. Rahul breaks down why spot order books fail against toxic makers, how transactional introspection protects liquidity, and the economics of running modern prop execution systems. He dives into the mechanics of Phoenix's new perps platform, managing oracle attacks on illiquid tokens, the structural advantages of owning user flow on-chain, and whether decentralized perps are a winner-take-most game.
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Notes:
* Firm held 20-25% crypto options market share.
* Toxic takers pick off makers for tens of K a day.
* Basic prop contracts can make around $1,000/day.
Timestamps:
00:00 Start
00:50 Rahul's background
02:45 Why move from spot trading?
06:50 Future of Prop AMMs
09:21 Order book games
14:07 Innovations on the horizon
16:17 RFQ
18:14 On-chain price dislocations
20:04 Why Perps?
25:35 Taker speedbumps
26:29 Market making in TradFi vs Crypto
28:30 MEV
29:39 Deciding assets to quote
31:43 Managing risk
33:16 MCP or bust
34:57 MPC problems
38:00 Why use Pheonix?
40:36 Composability
42:22 Splines
45:22 Scaling the market
47:51 "king making" on Solana
53:58 Are perps "winner take all"?
The Gwart Show is sponsored by Ellipsis Labs. Ellipsis Labs builds the
most efficient on-chain markets. Their orderbook and Prop AMM products
have delivered price improvement to hundreds of billions of dollars in
retail volume. Now, they are bringing their expertise to build Phoenix,
the best on-chain perpetuals platform.
Ellipsis Labs is hiring New York-based engineers. If you're an engineer
looking to work with a proven team in making DeFi better, go to
ellipsislabs.xyz slash careers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices