Ekiden’s Founder on how they plan to make onchain derivatives institution-ready

For me, it started with both curiosity and a clear market gap. Serum was one of the products that shaped my thinking early on, as it showed how strong an onchain trading ecosystem could be when the infrastructure is well built.

But it also made one thing clear to me: trading infrastructure cannot grow in isolation. In DeFi, liquidity, order flow, and value need to move across different projects and ecosystems. That composability is what creates better yields, stronger markets, and a better risk profile for everyone involved.

I wanted to build something that could take that idea further, beyond a single ecosystem, and in a way that could support higher volumes, greater reliability, and a more professional trading experience. If infrastructure is built in a siloed market, it will always struggle to compete with larger players. The only way to win is to create value across multiple projects simultaneously. To me, that is a core principle of DeFi.

Ekiden is the pinnacle of my career. The project is built on the experience I gained at Neon, RockawayX, and Mango. Thanks to Neon, I am tightly connected to both the Ethereum and Solana networks. I have built close ties with the founders of major Ethereum blue-chips and made great friends throughout the Solana community. This cross-chain experience gives me a clear, practical understanding of how these two distinct communities function.  

On the technical side, I understand how the EVM works much better than the SVM. Neon gave me deep insights into both technologies, including their specific strengths and engineering trade-offs. I am incredibly grateful for that experience.

Mango gave me a thorough understanding of perp traders and allowed me to engage directly with the Solana trading community. The Mango team was fantastic, full of talented and hard-working people, and I really admire everything they build.

RockawayX gave me the ability to take a high-level helicopter view of any sector and then dive straight into the technical weeds. That said, I actually learned my core execution skills many years before any of those experiences.

 We are building Ekiden to support serious trading use cases alongside institutional and advanced retail activity. Our focus centres on speed, reliability, and usability for professional participants. What sets us apart is our approach to the product: designing it with execution quality and real trading workflows in mind while fully preserving the benefits of on-chain transparency and user control.

We are launching on Canton, enabling us to deliver immediate value to existing players in the ecosystem rather than building in isolation. For example, we are integrating BitSafe’s cBTC as collateral, embedding TradeCraft’s swaps within the deposit flow, and leveraging Temple’s Vaults to enhance the overall trading experience.

The idea is simple. Ekiden is designed to be far more than a standalone trading venue. It operates within a deeply interconnected trading ecosystem where various infrastructure providers, liquidity sources, and user-facing products collaborate to deliver a superior experience for traders.

Institutional appetite is starting to wake up. It is a little scary because once it kicks in, institutions can eat the entire industry alive, and their appetite will only grow stronger from there.

Now the real work begins. We are launching and starting to grow from here, but a lot has already been done behind the scenes.

To be frank, the crypto narrative has not changed much since 2018. What has changed is momentum. The market is finally ready, and external factors are aligned: regulations are clearer, companies have figured out how to allocate, and the timing is right.

Perps are no longer exotic primitives; many people understand them now. They went through the "test in the trenches" and proved viable, so institutions will take it from here and start actively adding them to their portfolios.

Institutions are avoiding onchain markets because the infrastructure has not consistently met the standards they uphold in traditional markets. Execution speed, reliability, liquidity depth, and predictable settlement are not optional for these participants. They are the baseline.

So yes, that number reflects exactly what we are building towards. But infrastructure is only one part of the answer. A few other things still need to happen before that 46 per cent can move onchain at scale. First, collateral needs to become more flexible and capital-efficient. Institutions are not going to fragment their balance sheets across every venue. They need to use the assets they already hold, including BTC and real-world assets, as productive collateral.

Second, liquidity, hedging, and yield should move across protocols without forcing users into isolated silos. This is where onchain should actually outperform traditional infrastructure and where most current designs still fall short.

Third, the user experience for professional participants needs to align with what they are used to.

If those pieces come together, the 46 per cent ceases to be a survey response and becomes a flow of capital. Our job is to ensure the infrastructure layer is ready.

Every serious exchange has a small group of strategic liquidity partners, and for Ekiden, Keyrock is one of them.

In practice, this should translate into deeper liquidity, tighter spreads, and a more reliable trading experience from day one. Keyrock’s engineering team has worked closely with us on the exchange, covering infrastructure, API requirements, and execution quality.

Their BD team has also been highly engaged, which matters because an exchange is not just technology. It is the combination of liquidity, distribution, and market structure.

Over the next few years, my goal is to expand Ekiden from a single product into a broader onchain trading ecosystem. In the near term, we are focused on the launch, liquidity growth, team expansion, and strategic partnerships.

In the longer term, I believe more real markets will move onchain, giving people more direct access to the assets they want to own, whether those are commodities such as oil, electricity, and water, or a broader portfolio of financial and real-world assets.

We want to help make these markets more usable, transparent, and accessible onchain. Ultimately, our goal is not only to build better trading infrastructure but also to make trading more inclusive and to increase financial literacy for as many people as possible.