The Citadel Alum Reshaping The World Of Trading
About this episode
Avi interviews Vlad Novakovski about his journey from Citadel to founding Lighter and the innovations in on-chain trading.
This week, Avi sits down with Vlad Novakovski, founder and CEO of Lighter, the on-chain exchange partnered with Robinhood. Vlad went to high school with Robinhood's Vlad Tenev, competed in the Physics and Informatics Olympiads alongside future Anthropic co-founders and Facebook's first CTO, finished Harvard at 19, and was recruited to Citadel by Ken Griffin himself. We discuss the Olympiad pipeline that produced half of Silicon Valley, what Ken Griffin told him about Bernie Madoff in 2004, why Madoff couldn't have happened on-chain, why he left Wall Street for Silicon Valley and then came back, how he pivoted his company and kept 80% of his engineering team, the custom ZK circuits that let Lighter run finance at 1% of the compute cost, why he thinks Lighter beats Hyperliquid on every axis, the Robinhood partnership and onchain options coming in Q3, and why every dollar of value at Lighter accrues to the token instead of the equity. Enjoy! -- Follow Vlad: https://x.com/vnovakovski Follow Avi: https://x.com/AviFelman Follow Jonah: https://x.com/jvb_xyz Follow 1000x: https://x.com/1000xPod Join the 1000x Telegram: https://t.me/thousandxpod Try the 1000x Terminal: https://1000x.money…
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