Welcome back to Block by Block. I'm joined today by Simon Jones, the co-founder of Rhea. Welcome, Simon. Thank you for having me. Let's begin with the problem that Rhea is aiming to solve. What problem did you see that led to the building of Rhea? Yeah, I mean, probably just to start off with, like, what is rare? So rare is what I would consider a next generation perp dex. And the reason I say it's a next generation perp dex is we've actually been able to figure out what is essentially the holy grail of dex design, where we have been able to create a design that allows the exchange to be millisecond level fast and decentralized. Right? every single exchange to date, including some very big names like hyperliquid, right, like you are continuously making a trade off between can we be fast but less decentralized or can we be more decentralized but give up on or sacrifice speed. And what we have figured out, which is where we kind of very much do it is the Holy Grail, is we have figured out an architecture that allows us to be millisecond level fast, so fast enough for traditional finance. but actually also decentralized, meaning we also have the liveliness and censorship resistance guarantees that you get with something like Ethereum, which for the long-term success of any project is obviously extremely important. Got it. the trade off in perp dexes is the trade off between latency or speed versus decentralization and Rayya is the has found an architecture or created an architecture that doesn't have to make those trade offs. Exactly, right, and it's just it's kind of obvious any form of distributed system right as soon as it starts to become distributed you can have latency, right so Can you actually create something that is fast and decentralized that feels like an impossible engineering challenge and We're pretty happy to say that we figured it out Yeah, cheers with a little bit more about how Ray is doing that. Like, what does that architecture look like? Yes, just to add some context to that, there are two things which we're saying. So Rare is a product that is already live. We did not get to that design on the first step. We just knew that it was a very complicated thing to figure out. So what we did is the very first step is we launched the DEX using uh a customized version of Arbitrum Orbit. So it's a layer two on Ethereum. It's our own layer two on Ethereum. The only thing that exists on it is the exchange. um so you have your own custom block space for the exchange. That product is already a top 10 perpdex by volume. And actually, over recent months, it's been growing very quickly, which is obviously nice to be involved in, both for me and for the rest of the community. Off the back of having done that as the first step, we were able to figure out the end game, which is the exchange that is fast and decentralized. To explain the way that that works, um this is a bit of a mouthful, but it is going to be the world's first application-specific based roll-up on Ethereum. So, based meaning it inherits the security guarantees and sequencing rights directly from the L1 validator nodes. And just to go into more detail on the architecture and how it works, so... If you start with the problem, which is how can you be fast and decentralized? That problem arises from the fact that many exchanges to date have tried to basically couple execution and consensus into the same node type. So if you think about the way that hyper liquid works, fine, it's a very small number of validator nodes, but they have their own consensus mechanism. And in order for trades to go through, they have to go through, you have to that consensus mechanism. So you have execution and consensus happening. in the same node. And inevitably that introduced latency because you have to reach consensus across multiple nodes. So what we started to do through our research is we started to come up with an architecture that essentially decouples execution from consensus into different node types. And at an abstract level, that starts to look a little bit like an L2 and an L1. So you start to go, well, have you actually invented it? Have you just reinvented L2 and L1? The big difference with what we're doing is because it is based and essentially what that means is it means that the validators are delegating rights to these execution nodes for them to be able to include their blocks in the L1 block. What that means is that the execution node basically has a uh full economic guarantee that it's going to be able to include those transactions directly in the L1 block. So it's not optimistic, it's not ZK. And what that means for those execution nodes is that they can instantly give these pre-confs back to users that their trade will be included in the L1 block. So you have actually properly decoupled execution from consensus, but the economic security that exists around it is still derived from the L1. So you have highly performant execution environment, but security guarantees that are equivalent to the L1. That sounds really interesting. And I can see a uh segment of the audience being really, really caring about that. I'm curious about the other audience types that Rhea serves. You've got, I imagine, kind of hobbyist traders, hardcore traders, potentially some hedge funds or institutions. Looking at your various audiences, which audiences would care more about the technical aspects and that it is decentralized versus, you know, I just want a perp dex that is fast and it doesn't really matter how it happens. Yeah, so honestly, I think it's a great question. And the vast majority of people don't care about the build, right? They don't care about that level of architectural detail. They care about the outcome to them. And what the architecture unlocks is it unlocks the ability to have millisecond level execution. Now, for a large proportion of trading firms, is music to their ears. In fact, 60 % of all volume in traditional finance is done by high frequency trading firms. So there's 60 % of the market from TranFi today actually haven't really been operating in DeFi because these exchanges that built in DeFi are not kind of fast enough to meet the needs of their trading strategies. So we're actually kind of opening up this huge part of the market that exists in TranFi and we're able to bring them across to DeFi for the first time. this is kind of the interesting point. So speed, honestly, you go talk to them. And obviously, we talk to them all the time. Literally had a conversation yesterday with a very, very well known trading firm in TradFi, where they were extremely excited about the fact that they finally had millisecond level execution in DeFi. But on its own, speed is not enough. They also need um order flow to be trading against, right, and to run their trading strategies against. That then starts to shift you across to, so we're very attractive to this particular type of trading firm that doesn't currently exist in DeFi. How do we make ourselves attractive to the kind of like DGEN users, right, that exist in DeFi today, such that they're also trading on the exchange and we essentially match these two parties. And one of the things that we've been doing on that side is we've been increasingly experimenting with just making markets free. And what we've learned is that users on the DGEN side are actually extremely sensitive to fees. So if you take the fees away, lots of volume comes in. And okay, fine, there's a points system, right? So you could say, that's going to be inevitable that that happens. But actually, if you analyze a lot of that trading behavior, it is people who are moving across some venues where they are paying fees like Hyperliquid and then moving across to Rare to start running the exact same trading patterns that they were running before. but not in a venue that doesn't charge them fees. And what that means for us is we actually long-term have a demonstrably better kind of like value prop to each of these user groups. On one hand, you've got your DGENs where of course there's many things we focus on around user experience, around markets, stuff beyond pubs, which we're going to be announcing in not too distant future, but they are also very fee sensitive and we're removing fees from the equation for them. And then on the other side, we've got an exchange that is actually fast enough for these trading firms to come in and start using. Business question, how are you able to remove fees? mean, that's kind of the lifeblood of a perp dex. That's where revenue comes from. Yeah, so it's twofold. So once you get a lot of order flow and activity, you can actually charge the trading firms. So in order for them to actually be able to access millisecond level speed, we charge them for priority access. So you can have a free lane, which is slower, or you can have a fast lane, which is paid for. And there are trading firms which are already gearing up to do that. The other one which we've done, which we're going to be leaning into more is I don't think a Perpdex should just remain a Perpdex. fact, one of the teams that I think is doing a great job of this is Jupiter on Solana, where they're expanding into kind of like a super app. And we have already done one of the next products where we have our own yield-bearing stablecoin. And at the moment, 75 % of all the margin that users are depositing on Raya they are choosing to convert into this yield bearing stablecoin. And we do not do this now. All of the revenue, all of the yields that stablecoin generates goes back to the users. But just like Athena have now turned on the fee switch, right? And they're taking like a proportion of that yield in the future. That's something that Raya could do for the Dow as well. So that you start to shift your like revenue model away from charging DGNs to trade and actually finding alternative ways of making revenue. That's really cool. Tell me about the, you you made the comment that you found out that traders are very fee sensitive. was that some market research you had done or some testing? Like, how did you arrive at that conclusion? We've been doing a lot of testing. Yeah. So there's, um, so it started off with us just testing a market for a week. Like if we make ETH free for a week, in fact, we deliberately did ETH all time high. We're like, okay, fine. We're going to time it around something which is fun. Right. So ETH all time high, we're going to make ETH trading for a week. And let's just analyze not just the headline volume, but actually is this bringing in new users? What, where are those users coming from? Like what are their trading strategies? What's actually going on once you make it free? And we could very, very clearly see in the data, there's people moving across from other venues that were charging them and they're actually choosing to place their trades on rare because they don't have to pay fees. That was the first test we've done. We've actually done more. So even right now on the app, ETH and BTC are free. We have not rolled this out to every market yet. uh But at the moment, ETH and BTC are free. And you can again see like lots of people have moved across trading activity from venues where they're paying. across the row. And how are you, so when you make a market free like ETH and BTC, um how are you bringing, I guess, creating brand awareness for traders? Because there's, you know, there's a number of perp dexes. Many of them have incentive programs going on and it's a kind of a noisy space. um I'm a very active perp trader. um And I just know that there's like a lot of dexes I don't know about. And I'm curious about how you're bringing awareness to traders because that's that test and the results that you discovered. think it's in hindsight kind of makes kind of obvious and makes sense, but it's really great to have that type of data, especially uh knowing from which other DEXs they are coming from. think that's that's really valuable information. Yeah. So honestly, kind of the, haven't, I've got to be honest, I don't feel like we've necessarily done anything magical there from a marketing perspective. Like we're as a team, we're a team of DGENs ourselves, right? Like we've kind of been building this space for like four or five years for the vast majority of the team. we, uh we kind of like tweet stuff. We put it out to the community. mean, the discord community is like 50,000 strong at this point. um There's community mods, there's community advocates, and typically it all just spreads by word of mouth more than anything. Now, should we be doing more? Probably. So obviously talking to you is a great thing. But a lot of the marketing, honestly, it has come off the back of word of mouth, us building a great product and people being excited to share that with people they know. That's great. And as far as like numbers go, I'm looking at a tweet that you posted a couple of weeks ago, September. Rhea was number seven in terms of volume, 24 hours, 507 million. And then the last seven days, like close to 5 billion. That's really exciting. And congratulations on that growth. That's amazing. Yeah, so it's basically from April to now, we have at least doubled volume every month. So that started from the very low, measly number of 100 million in the whole of April to last month, we did 8 billion in the month and already this month, we've surpassed That's amazing. And don't get me wrong, like, perps are hot at the moment. Everybody knows that. But what actually matters is, the volume in the overall market has increased, our market share has been increasing. So that's kind how we know that we are continuing to, I guess, ultimately deliver value to users and keep growing that market share. Yeah, that's amazing. Really seriously, congratulations. Because it's getting that kind of volume is what I love about the kind of the consumer ah crypto space is you get immediate feedback. If something's working, if something's not, then you're able to tweak it uh versus the other kind of infrastructure plays in blockchain where it's you don't get that type of immediate feedback. um And that's what I love about, know, perp stacks is because there's clear product market fit. and you get immediate feedback from your users. um Let's talk about the, as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of perp's dexes and most of them have incentive programs going on to instead of ice usage. um And it is very, very hot right now. And I'm curious about your, how you're positioning Raya, like relative to competitors, or if that's even something that you're thinking about right now. So it definitely is to an extent, right? I um think we are able to lean into these long-term benefits of being fast and therefore changing the business model to be free for DGENs, to be long-term kind of more stable, right? Because we inherit the decentralization benefits of Ethereum. So long-term better liveness and censorship resistance guarantees. And then long term, also because we're a based roll up, we can actually be atomically composable with a lot of the Ethereum L1 DeFi. So long term you'll able to do a flash loan on Aave and do a trade on Rare, um which is going to unlock a whole load of different use cases which people haven't even thought of yet. So those types of things are very exciting for anybody that's involved in Rare and start seeing them be rolled out. Realistically, they'll be rolled out through next year because we've got a lot to do in Q4. But as people start seeing that rolled out, I think they'll very quickly realize, hold on a minute, just like Hyperliquid's got Hyperliquid and HyperEVM, well, Rayo's got Rayo and Ethereum L1. And these two things are actually composable with each other. That's incredible. There's an entirely new design space of products that you can start to unlock. um So that type of stuff is exciting for people. But alongside that, honestly, a lot of what we do from a competitive perspective is just build a great product. There's many product dexs out there. There's some that are good. There's many that are less good. And actually being a place where traders can very reliably and predictably deploy trading strategies. They know that they're always going to get the newest markets. They know that there's a roadmap of new features which are coming out. It's a place that makes sense for them to spend time and enjoy being part of that community. That's obviously things that we deliberately lean into. You know, I've interviewed a number of perps dexes on the show um and I'm seeing kind of innovation in two ways. One type of innovation is they're integrating privacy into trades so that, you know, your trades are private and no one can see what strategies you're employing. The other kind of a way that I'm seeing perps dexes differentiate is they're vertically integrating. And so there's the perps dex and then I'm aware of another one uh that is integrating the perps dex plus spot plus lending. And that's quite exciting. And you mentioned the flash loans and Aave and be able to trade on Raya. Like that is really, really exciting. But it's a brand new space and people, I don't know if people can imagine like what could be built if that were. like a possibility, you know, what strategies could be employed? Like, tell us about like the, how are you educating developers, maybe the market and helping them to say, Hey, if we had, you know, Aave lending, like a flash loan and Ray of perps trading, like here's the kinds of things you could actually do. Yeah, it's a good question. I think ultimately that ends up rolling back to the trader more than the builder, I think. Certainly the way that we think about it is that we've got a body of very active traders on the product and what are the additional products that we can integrate from Ethereum and kind of push through to our users to provide them with value. a lot of traders, I mean, the thing is you can do a lot of this stuff on the CIFAR exchanges. Like on Binance, you can borrow. And that opens the door to being able to deploy kind of different strategies. It might be, for example, a basis trade. You might not want to actually buy ETH. You might want to just borrow ETH and then do the basis trade. And depending on the way that you structure that, you can actually boost your yield. So these types of kind of core features that exist on a lot of the CIFI exchanges, we're finding a way to bring them into RER. albeit in a different way because we're doing it through a composability mechanism rather than us building our own lending mechanism. And what we want that to do long, at least in the short term, is basically give people no reason to ever trade on a CIFAR exchange ever again. You can just continue to live completely on chain and all of these features that you're used to having on a CIFAR exchange, will all now exist inside Rare, albeit it's built off the power of Ethereum DeFi rather than just us building all of it ourselves. So that's certainly the short term. think over the medium term, the, whenever you open this stuff up and whether you start just allowing people to innovate and build in a completely different way, honestly, there's things that we just won't even be able to think of that people will come up with. that honestly, that's the bit that I'm really excited about, but the stuff that's going to happen in the short term is actually just making sure that we continue to roll out these features that exist on CFA exchanges. We know they deliver value to traders and we want to keep building that value with our user group. Yeah, I love that. I'm thinking of, you know, going back to kind of the trader personas and I love that you're building kind of the building blocks by which, you know, people can then, you know, like Lego blocks, they can use this and that and to build some kind of strategy and you're building those blocks for them that they can just use openly and with agency. But for like brand new traders or maybe traders that are not sophisticated, um I've often thought about like, what if there was like a recipe book that, you know, if they want to do this kind of trade, then you follow, you grab that recipe and then you just kind of follow it. Like something like that would be, I don't know, I'm guessing very helpful for brand new traders that have capital, that have time and want to be able to kind of deploy their capital in a trading strategy. But they need more help because it's, you know, it's complicated, it's new, they might be new to crypto. What do you think about that for not sophisticated traders but still an interesting audience to serve? Yeah, so there's, I mean, there's different ways of serving those users. So copy trading is something that we've discussed internally a couple of times. It is something which we could roll out. um There's definitely been a few DEXs that have done that in the past, right? And it has a degree of product market fit, right? Like you can create these vaults where people can basically deposit money and they just automatically copy like a big trader, right? And that big trader might even deliberately let you copy them and they can earn additional revenue off the assets they've been deposited. So there's definitely one way of doing it. And we, as a team, we have discussed that. I think the other way is to keep leaning into that vault structure. So there are some very simple um strategies like basis trade or funding rate arbitrage that people consistently do and deploy and Again, through the vault structure, oh you can set these strategies up and let people deposit assets into those vaults to follow those strategies. And what you can do, which is actually also kind of cool, is you can tokenize them. um That's not a new thing. So even just look at Athena. Athena is just tokenized version of the basis trade. The staked USD, that is a tokenized version of the basis trade. um So we could do it or we could partner with other people who doing those types of things and push those products through to our users. And to be honest, it's actually the latter that we've been leaning into more. So if there is already a very generic trading strategy that generates good, consistent yield that has been tokenized, how can we actually bring that product through to our users and give them access to I think that makes sense. Are you doing that through kind of a builder codes kind of approach or partnership, white label? How are you doing that? Yeah, at the moment it's all partnership. So bringing in other products to Rare and making them accessible to our users is that at the moment is via partnership. What it is does exist via, we never called it Builder Codes, we called it something else, but everybody's kind of like landed on Builder Codes as the language. So we have Builder Codes on Rare as of today. And there's a bunch of different front ends that are built on top of like the liquidity infrastructure that we've created. So that allows them to create and plug in pubs to their product. it's, I mean, obviously hyperliquid, the truth is they are leading that at the moment. But the thing that we will allow, which is very different to hyperliquid is we will allow people to set their own fees because trading is free. Now, if you could talk to someone like Metamask, just to use it as an example, they don't think it needs to be free because they think they can charge for the fact that someone wants the brand and security and recognition of the fact that they're using a Metamask product. So they actually announced today they're partnering with Hyperliquid. But if you could remove... At the moment, there's a revenue share between Hyperliquid and Metamask. If you could just invert that so that Metamask are able to capture all of the revenue, there's a proportion of builders where that could become very attractive. You know, I'm very active in the Infinex community and I use the Infinex super app. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. um But they have this notion of an app store. And they have Aave right now. And they have what they're calling Infinex perps, but it's really hyperliquid on the back end. And um they're innovating on the user interface. Even though it's hyperliquid on the back end, they've actually done a number of things on the user interface side that makes it much nicer to actually use Infinex perps, even though on the back end it's hyperliquid. And I'm curious if being in the Infinex, if Rhea were in the Infinex app store, that could be another way of capturing a different audience that maybe didn't know about Rhea before. Now it's like in this app store, they have all their capital in this super app. um you know, this wallet and deploying it in one of the apps in the app store is like very, very easy. It's a really a great, great super app if you haven't used it. But I don't know where I was going with that other than it would be great if Raya were on Infinex because that would just make it so much easier, at least for me, since I use Infinex all the time. um It's already there. And if you had the option of trading with no fees or with fees, which would you choose? Absolutely no fees. Yeah, there you go. that I mean, that's the fact and even if the fees are half, you probably just take half fees. um Yeah, so that I agree with you, it'd be great if we were in Infinex. I mean, the builder codes existed that can be built by the Infinex team very easily. Yeah, I can intro you to Kane, by the way, who, you he's the founder of, and I'm sure the, ah what's it called? One of the investors for Aurea is also very close to Kane. m Vance and Michael. I cannot think of their VC fund, what is it? Framework, framework, exactly. Yeah, they're like super close. Okay. I know Kane as well. I just haven't we haven't caught up for a long time. Okay, well I can ping them because I'd love if Ray were in it. Let's do it. So I think let's let's make it happen. And it's also he's a big ethog right? Like just what more do you want than the theorems and shrine decks going into infinite? Exactly. Let's talk about that word enshrined. Can you maybe define that for the audience? And why is that a big deal? Well, so enshrined and abstract sense is effectively how do you add functionality into the existing L1, right? How do you enshrine some sort of functionality into the existing L1? And obviously Ethereum's, like the breakthrough of Ethereum is that it is by design, it is generic, right? You can create lots of applications on top of it. So by design, it's not something like hyperliquid where you have a DEX embedded into the actual like under the idea of hyperliquid is you embedded DEX into the underlying L1. It's debatable whether they have done that, of course, because you kind of got these two blockchains. But what we're doing by creating a DEX that is a based roll up is we are effectively embedding a DEX into the Ethereum L1. We're enshrining a DEX into the Ethereum L1. And it's incredibly powerful is just even if you look at it through a pure Ethereum perspective, think two years ago, Ethereum had a 75 % market share of all perpetual futures. As of today, even if you include L2s, it's got like a, like the L2s from an optimistic perspective, it's got like a 10 % market share. So it's gone from 72 % to 10%. So, now why is that a problem? Well, it's a problem because, Trading is one of the biggest things that sucks in users. So if you want users to be kind of active in an ecosystem and in an environment and to sustain them over the long term, then actually having a very successful trading application in that environment is clearly important. It's the whole hyper liquid thesis. Going to build the decks to attract the users who can add the ecosystem on the back end. So what we're wanting to do, and obviously with this enshrined product is create Ethereum's Dex, like the Ethereum native Dex. And uh over the long term, bringing in lot of users and those users are able to benefit of the fact that we will be synchronously composable with Ethereum DeFi. And Ethereum DeFi will be able to benefit from the fact that we're bringing in a whole lot of users to the ecosystem. Yeah. The demand side and supply side, which is these two-sided markets are always hard to build. um And you guys are building that. You launch in April, and you're growing tremendously. Let's talk about the Oracle that you guys are using. I don't know if you're aware, but I'm the CMO of Redstone. And we are... um uh We serve a number of, know, TradFi as well as DeFi projects. And what is kind of unique about us is the speed at which we deliver these price feeds. We have kind of a push and pull model. um And uh we announced last week that, you know, one of our products is being used by pretty much all the applications on MegaEath. And why that's interesting is because all of these applications require like, you know, 2.2 millisecond price feeds and no other Oracle can really provide that. um And with Raya being so fast on Ethereum, I'm curious how you guys are getting price feeds at that level of speed. Yeah, so honestly, I know Redstone well. uh My previous project called Vaults, we worked with the Redstone guys. So I've known them for a long time, actually, almost three years, I think is probably kind of the timeframe. Basically, since Redstone started, I've known them. So it's a great product. And I love the guys. And I love the product. We actually use a different Oracle. We use an Oracle called Stork. um And their kind of USP is that they wanted to build specifically for perp dexes. So building Oracle feeds that are as low latency as possible. So those speeds get down to, think, about 10 milliseconds. And we use those Oracle prices throughout the rare product. um So looking forward, let's say, I don't know, 18 to 24 months, if everything goes as you planned, like what will 18 to 24 months look like? And if you were looking back, like what were the key things that you and the team did to make things go right? Yeah, that's a great question. I think what 18 to 24 months from now, we want to be the number one DEX in the whole space. Right. That's the objective. That's kind of why we're here. I also think there is an important point within that is that as an industry, we are growing the size of the pie too. So if you rewind 18 to 24 months and see the total volume in the market, in the DEX market versus today, I think it's gone from something like around 10 billion a day to something around 50 billion a day. So there's been like a 5x increase. As the market size is getting bigger and actually over the next 18 to 24 months, I think we could probably 10x that because the quality of the product is getting so much better. It is genuinely able to rival CIFI, right? So there's going to be a huge, in my opinion, it's going to continued huge migration from CIFI to DeFi plus just the perpetual market in general around the world is going to get bigger. Nevertheless, we still want to be number one. So So 18 to 24 months, we want to get to that number one spot. What does that version of Rare looks like? We will have finished rolling out the entire base design. So at that point, you will have millisecond level speed, you'll have Ethereum's decentralization, but also from a user's perspective, we're going to start aggregating Ethereum DeFi into the app. So there's going to be these different use cases, which you do not currently have on a perpetual dex that you're going to be able to unlock on Rare. which we're super excited about. And I think the other thing which I'd add to that is markets. So we're a perps, dex at the moment. We're going to be rolling out spots in the not too distant future. And then we have already done a test with what I describe as RWA perps, but just in general, equity perps is going to be a big thing. And 18 to 24 months from now, I think it's like, Lots of DEXes will have equity pubs, but we want to be one of the leaders in that space. We interviewed Avantis a couple of months ago and um they've done quite well on the RWA side. um And I can see there's a lot of appetite. So the volume at the moment is still low. So we've launched gold. We could launch lots more markets very easily if we wanted to, because there's market makers lined up to do that. But the volume as of today is low. But I think it will follow a similar path to pretty much anything new. So if you think when BitMEX invented the pub, it took about two years for it to really take off. And I think equity perhaps follow a similar path. There won't be loads of activity and then all of a sudden there'll be lots of activity. It probably is going to just be increment. Sorry, the words got out my head. um The curve. Damn, the words got out my head. But it's to follow exponential growth. So you're going to as you go from one to two, two to four, four to eight, eight to 16. going to be like, well, there's not much going on here. And then all of a sudden, when you're going from like, kind of 16 to 32, 32, 64, 128, 256, right, it's, then you're to be like, Oh, hold on a minute, like what's going on? There's so much adoption of this product. And I think that will probably take about 18 to 24 months. I agree. I'm very excited about the RW space and the potential for perps dexes. Yeah. And just, just to add to that, the one thing that I would say it's actually, you need multiple dexes doing the same thing. Cause one big thing, which I don't think people even realize is there's a huge part of the market that doesn't trade anything to do with the price. Really. It just trades funding rates. And what you want is you want multiple exchanges where perhaps there is some dislocation and people are then actually. just trading the funding rates around those products. And it helps basically enable those perp exchanges to generate enough volume to get the liquidity and the traction to make trading conditions better and then attract bigger traders and basically drive that flywheel. So I love the Avantis team. Yeah, I hope that we can both build equity perps together. Yeah, the funding rate arbitrage, like one of those, one example of that would be like a delta neutral kind of strategy would be very, very interesting. And I can totally see why, you know, multiple perps dexes are required to do that. I've often wanted to do that, but stay within the same decks, but haven't been able to because of limitations of the decks. And And haven't done that type of strategy with multiple DEXs because I've found it that like technically it's kind of a pain. um But I can see like professional traders, like that's, that's like what they do for their day job. ah I can definitely see them doing that for sure. Yeah, mean, hobbyists do it as well. Right. We've put out tweets in the past, particularly for new markets. New markets are often very inefficient. So we launched pump like 24 hours after hyperliquid launched pre-market and the funny rate on, I can't remember the numbers, but like the funny rate on hyperliquid is positive by like 200 % and on rare is negative by like 200 % or something like that. I mean, We know that people weren't even doing this programmatically. They're just coming in. You go short one side along with the other and you're collecting a 400 % APY. That's awesome. Let's talk about incentive mechanisms. I understand that Rhea has kind of a points program. Maybe share with the audience what that looks like and how that's going. Yes, there's a finite number of points that are distributed each week. So what that does is it just makes it very predictable. Come TG, you can sort of do your napkin math of, OK, there's probably going to be this many points. I think it's going to be this much allocation. You can start to work out a value per point. So it's a deliberate mechanism to avoid having an inflationary number, and it becomes confusing for users. So that's probably the starting point. In a given week, There's basically points that are distributed for three different tracks. There's one which is for trading. There's another which is for staking. So people can stake assets to provide liquidity that is used as a liquidity for the markets. And then the third is something that we describe as signal. So people who are tweeting about Rare, instead of us distributing a load of points to Kaito as an example, we didn't want to do that. We wanted to keep it within the community. So you have these three different tracks by far the biggest track is trading like rare is a product for traders I'm trying to remember the numbers off the top of my head. It's I think about we distribute about 150,000 points a week a Hundred thousand of that is for trading right? So it's by far the biggest track and that's awarded for All sorts of different actions is rewarded for PNL. It's rewarded for liquidations if you get liquidated, if you're the biggest liquidation in a given day, then you can be rest assured that you're to get a bucket of points just say that sort of in in its own sense encourages real trading activity. This stuff for open interest and then of course the stuff for volume. oh Tell us about the staking part because that's kind of, I think, new. It's a new feature for perp's dexes. Why do you have that and what purpose does that serve? Yeah, so our users stake assets and those stake dollars, so it's USDC, and that kind of pool of dollars is used to create the liquidity on the market. And the value of that to the people that are staking is that it runs a market making strategy that generates yield. So that has historically been around 10 to 20 % APY. And the value to the product is that the exchange has very liquid markets. again, sort of, mean, the exchange in its core is matchmaking between different parties. But in this instance, we're bringing in people who might not know how to trade. Instead, they can just deposit assets, collect yield, and actually in the background, that yield is coming from a market making strategy. That's really interesting. And that's a feature I don't see in a lot of perps dexes. It's feature that exists on Raya. One of the very cool things is that we have tokenized that pool. So when we say we've got our own yield bearing stablecoin, it is that. So if you deposit assets into it, you receive back S-RUSD, so state RUSD, where RUSD is our stablecoin. if you think that's like, so that on its own is quite cool. What's even more cool is you can use that as margin to trade. So people come in and if they are wanting to trade, they can actually deposit assets into the pool, which creates liquidity for the exchange. They receive back SISD, which is generating yield, and then they can use that as their margin. And if we go back to something I said at the beginning, 75 % of all deposits on the exchange are in staked RUSD. So only 25 % of deposits are kept in USDC. Wow, I mean not only does that create more efficiency for your capital, but it gives you more options to be able to lever even higher and make more money. I wonder why other perpstexes don't do this. This is really cool. Yeah, I think people are about to start copying it because one of the things that we are about to enable is as of today whilst it is tokenized, you can only use it in rare as margin. But one of the things we're about to allow you to do is to transfer that to other places. So imagine transferring it to a lending pool and borrowing against it and people could then start to loop. This is one example, you could do pendle stuff with it as another example. So there's all these different uh It's a product in its own self, but there's all these different things you're suddenly going to be able to do with this tokenized version of the liquidity pool. That's awesome. um You mentioned the community earlier. Maybe tell us about the community. uh Where can people join? um And what types of things are you doing to kind of grow the community, maybe keep the energy level up, that type of thing? Yeah, there's, well, so the easiest, if you haven't heard of before, the easiest thing to do is go to Twitter, rare, underscore, xyz, and just follow us. But the community is active predominantly in Discord. There's both a Telegram and a Discord community. Discord is 50,000. I think Telegram is like a thousand, right? Like it's not been something that we've pushed. And there's loads of ways you can get involved. There's a, we obviously have this track called Signal, which is for people who... can't trade, don't maybe have much money to stake, right? But they want to support the project in some way. And there's different types of roles that people can have to earn Signal. They could be a mod in the Discord. They could be somebody who's promoting rare on Twitter. We've got different levels depending on the size of somebody's audience. So if someone's got 50,000 plus followers, then we actually have a different track that we can do for them from a Signal perspective. So there's many different ways for people to get involved and to contribute to the project, even if you're not a trader or a staker. That's great. Well, Simon, is there anything that we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to? Great question. um There's always stuff. But no, I think we've covered most of it off, right? We're very excited about what we're building. It's a competitive space. There's absolutely no doubt about that. But we've been growing nicely. And more than anything, I'm excited about seeing the community continue to grow as we watch it go from like 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000. We want to get that to 100,000 people who all love Rare, excited about what we're doing and are able to participate in the success of the project. That's awesome. Well, I'm definitely going to give it a shot. I have to be honest, I had not heard of Raya until you and I got together on Telegram. And but I'm loving the features that I'm hearing. And I wish that I had known about Raya earlier. I'm m definitely going to I'm going to give it a shot. Yeah. So on that point, as you know, for traders that are listening to the show, You know, they're probably thinking, is it too late to participate in RAYA on the points program? What's your answer for them? So my answer is very simple. It's kind of never too late. Even if the token was live, it wouldn't be too late because you've actually just got the opportunity for liquid rewards. um But no, it's not too late. If anything, it's the perfect time. We've got a really big quarter ahead. And oh yeah, we're excited about more people coming in and trying the product. Awesome. Well, Simon Jones from Rhea, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.