Stop paying your on-chain taxes @fogo just hit a new 7-day low in average transaction fees at just $0.0000002392 The greatest on-chain trading experience starts when execution costs are basically invisible 📊

There are ~5-10 key architecture decisions that make or break every large engineering system. A misstep in one of these decisions can lead to irrecoverable roadblocks for the product in the long term. @PhoenixTrade is not a software masterpiece, but it's the first truly viable fully on-chain perps smart contract on @solana because we made reasonable decisions in the most critical areas. Matching Engine The Phoenix matching engine handles trades atomically for all counterparties. This means that after a single transaction, the taker and maker positions are all fully updated to reflect the trade result. It also stores limit orders sorted by price and time. No other perps DEX on Solana in the past has ever supported both single-transaction matching AND price-time priority. We realized that this is not a pure tradeoff and made it the top priority in the matching engine design. While this may seem like a niche technical detail, price-based priority algorithms protect users by guaranteeing that they always get the best price to trade based on the state of the book. Non-atomic trade settlement also causes UX problems and operational problems. A delay in processing maker trades leads to more gas spent in the backend system and more latency in the UI. Users will remember a clunky trading experience even if they don't understand why. Efficient Market Maker Updates Phoenix has a special order type for professional market makers called "spline orders". At a high level, this order type allows market makers to configure the liquidity depth of the book at different offsets from a mid price and provides an entrypoint for efficiently updating the mid price of their orders. Due to the nature of the current Solana scheduler, the ability to update book orders with low computational overhead enables MMs to cancel and replace quotes with both high scheduler priority and low cost. This is a critical feature for Phoenix to support the deep liquidity necessary to offer a world-class trading experience. Risk Engine The margin system on Phoenix is completely decoupled from the matching engine because they fundamentally serve different purposes. The matching engine is functionally a fancy calculator that facilitates risk transfer between counterparties. The risk engine is a read-only check on the validity of these transactions. Phoenix's fully on-chain risk engine computes the required margin, liquidation status, total withdrawable balance, and free collateral all under Solana's tight computation constraints. There are even a handful of clever tricks in the margin math that make it impossible to withdraw funds or gain additional margin on positive uPnL on particularly illiquid assets, given the right configuration. The software separation between risk and matching enabled the team to easily reason about the behavior of both complex systems in isolation and, as a result, made the system easier to reason about and easier to update. These properties ultimately reflect in the end user's trading experience and (ideally) protect the exchange. Conclusion Other major technical decisions made Phoenix possible as a pure engineering feat, but these were a handful that I think uniquely demonstrate why system-level decision-making is so important. If we didn't figure out any one of the above designs, the end-user experience of Phoenix would be meaningfully worse, and the team's ability to improve on the product would be meaningfully weakened. Any system hoping to build serious financial products needs to bring the same level of care and decision-making to all of the core software components. For Phoenix in particular, this meant thoroughly understanding what it took to not only build a functional and efficient exchange but also fitting that design to the constraints imposed by the Solana smart contract environment.

Ken Griffin went home on a Friday "fairly depressed" after watching AI agents at Citadel do work that used to take teams of PhDs in finance months to complete. Done in days. His words: "These are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are extraordinarily high skilled jobs being automated by agentic AI." This is the head of one of the most successful hedge funds in history saying the people he pays seven figures to analyze markets and structure deals are being replaced by software that works in hours instead of months. Not theoretically. In his own office. Right now. The Coatue deck we covered earlier this week called agents "the biggest unlock" in AI. Griffin just confirmed it from the buy side. The shift from copilots to agents is not a future event. It is already happening at the highest levels of finance.

Hyperliquid bulls canceled me for this tweet So let’s talk facts: 1. OI While BTC open interest on HL is $2.3B, Phoenix sits at just $2M (around 1000x smaller) But context matters: Phoenix is still in closed beta HL needed around half a year to reach a TOTAL of $10M OI and almost a full year to hit $100M 2. Fees - Phoenix Opening/Closing: 0.035% (Taker) - HL Opening/Closing: 0.045% (Taker) For commodities, HL fees go up to 0.09% (Taker) That means Phoenix is at least 20% cheaper on roundtrip trades. For commodities, it can be up to 6x cheaper while funding rates stay relatively similar 3. Spread Phoenix already has some of the tightest spreads on Solana at around 0.011% HL is still roughly 10x tighter with spreads around 0.001% That said, slippage on Phoenix is currently much higher too 4. @toly bull posting Phoenix Jeff and Xulian cold dmed hundreds of people, promoted HL in NFT Discord servers, and more There’s nothing wrong with being a salesman for your own product or ecosystem I respect both Jeff and someone like Toly, who could literally spend all day drunk somewhere in the Bahamas but still chooses to push Solana builders So what’s better currently? Obviously HL (and yes, I love HL) Lower fees are nice, but these things matter more: - liquidity depth - spread quality - latency - order book resilience - user retention - trading tools, etc. Phoenix is still in baby shoes. You can’t expect a protocol in closed beta to operate at the same level as HL already And competition is healthy for the space If you genuinely believe in crypto and mainstream adoption, do you really think there will only be one perps platform? Every major industry has multiple winners And I believe Phoenix has what it takes to compete with HL in the coming months or years In the end, this was never really about fees themselves It was about how effectively you can market and generate maximum engagement for the underlying protocol And judging by the reactions… it worked

Excited to see everyone come together for this historic moment. AQAv2 brings the protocol-aligned stablecoin model that @Nativemarkets trail-blazed to USDC with @Coinbase and @Circle's commitment to Hyperliquid. The community no longer has to choose between liquidity and alignment. Our industry will face adversity as we continue to grow. It gives me hope seeing titans of the industry come together to build for users and bring all of finance onchain.

For Sagurton enjoyers, he's currently on track in May to mention "Solana" more than the chain he runs — the first time this phenomenon has occurred since August 2025. Currently at 2x. Data here: