Zeta Markets Founder Tristan Frizza on Solana’s DeFi Layer 2 Plans, Perpetual Trading, and DeFi Summer 2024

Last updated: May 21, 2024, 11:18 a.m. EDT | 4 minutes of reading

In an exclusive interview with CryptonewsTristan Frizza, the founder of the DeFi platform Zeta Marketsan on-chain options trading protocol on the Solana blockchain, explained how he came to rely on Solana, encouraged by a conversation with the chain’s founder.

He spoke about Solana’s congestion issues, the construction of the first Solana L2, and how it will benefit Zeta and the broader community.

A call with Yakovenko from Solana

At the start of 2021, Frizza began to rely on Ethereumwishing to create a derivatives exchange.

However, he quickly realized that this product would not be suitable for the Ethereum mainnet. The team reached out to various rollup providers, but it was still years away from launch.

Frizza decided to look at different channels, finding Solana to be “the real outlier.” As an engineer, he saw Solana as a very interesting blockchain, even though it was much smaller at the time.

Interestingly, Frizza reached out to members of the Solana team, making a call with co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko himself.

Chatting with Yakovenko and learning more about his professional background further encouraged Frizza to lean on Solana.

“I tell myself, I really want to build where this guy builds,” he said. “It looks like he has a great team, and they have a great vision.”

Solana allowed them to create a scalable, fast, efficient network with lower costs.

Additionally, Yakovenko eventually became Zeta’s angel investor.

Congestion problems are a major obstacle

Founded in 2021, Zeta has seen $6 billion in trading volume and more than 6 million transactions so far, its founder said. Additionally, it has around 100,000 monthly active users.

“So there’s quite a bit of adoption and a little bit of traction there,” Frizza remarked.

The team had to scale systems “pretty aggressively” on Solana over the past six months as all these users and transaction volumes flooded in. “And it works quite well,” he added.

However, there are “obstacles” and technical difficulties.

While most are minor, like fixing a bug every now and then, the most recent hurdle is Solana’s congestion issues.

This makes it “very difficult” for teams to create, especially products like Lending Protocols or NFTs.

protocol or an NFT protocol or something like that. It might not matter if your transaction doesn’t go through for a second or two. But we’re talking about leveraged criminals and stuff like that.

In crypto, prices move very quickly, and Zeta needs to be able to move quickly for its users as well.

“We’ve been able to mitigate a lot of that, which has been a good thing,” Frizza said. “But it’s really nice to have our own kind of block space, to be able to tweak the parameters a little bit more to build something that will be really competitive with, say, centralized exchanges.”

Solana L2 building: uncharted territory

Zeta Markets recently raised $5 million in a funding round led by Electric capital., with the participation of industry leaders and angel investors, such as Yakovenko.

The increase came ahead of Zeta’s Solana Layer 2 rollup and highly anticipated token launch.

The main objective of this increase, Frizza told us, is to restart this development in L2.

Zeta has already built a “pretty impressive exchange.” “It works pretty well.”

But “now it takes this [and] scale it.

The team is digging deeper into the infrastructure side, which improves customization, throughput, and performance.

Additionally, L2 will allow Zeta to go from the 400 millisecond block times they have on Solana to around 10 milliseconds.

To accomplish all of this, the team had to move from building a simple smart contract to building some rails to sit on.

“And to be honest, no one has built an L2 on Solana before. It’s like a very new thing, very unexplored territory,” Frizza said.

It requires a lot of work and research, extensive engineering, and hiring a team of experts.

Additionally, the team will also eliminate “a bunch of things like gas fees.”

So ultimately, Frizza said, they are working to build “something that rivals centralized exchanges” while still bringing the benefits of DeFi, including self-custody, transparency and security.

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That’s not all.

In this interview, Frizza also discussed:

• write his thesis on the generative adversarial network for image super-resolution;
• how AI models have changed and improved in just a few years;
• moving to Singapore with just one suitcase and getting a 50-inch screen for coding;
• crypto players, leverage, futures and options;
• resolve Solana’s congestion issues;
• Solana’s current DeFi ecosystem outlook and outlook for DeFi summer 2024;
• the future trajectory of DeFi and how Zeta Markets is positioned to influence the evolving financial landscape.

You can look the full episode of the podcast here.

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About Tristan Frizza

Tristan Frizza is the founder of Zeta Markets.

He completed his degree in Computer Science with emphasis on distributed systems and PoW blockchain technology.

Frizza later worked in AI research and as a data scientist in Silicon Valley, eventually writing his thesis on the Generative Adversarial Network for Image Super-Resolution, for which he received first-class honors .

In 2021, Team Zeta won a Solana hackathon against 13,000 participants, which catalyzed the transformation of their proof of concept into a leading decentralized exchange.

Today, Zeta has processed over $5 billion in trading volume.

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