LYS Labs

I spent the last 3 weeks talking to basically everyone I could. Core devs, defi devs, schedulers (or people who like the scheduler solutions), validators and others who understand this stuff. Mainly because I wanted to understand as many perspectives as possible. Obviously nearly everyone has inherent bias for one reason or another, understandably. The one thing I realized during this is that a lot information I was hearing was second hand, or very narrow, because everyone has their focus. I wanted to go deeper and start talking to makers and HFTs because I have seen near zero of that information public. Those groups are actually some of the most important, because they are users. Not just theorists. So to answer your question, I've spoken to 3 larger ones, one smaller one and also got information about others from people who actively talk to them. You'd be surprised how varying opinions can be. One thing from makers is just how insanely hard dev ex is for them, and they need entire teams to manage it. We don't have cozy apis and you need to know a quite a bit about solana. 1. Makers needs traders and traders need makers, so its a bit of a chicken and egg. HL nailed it because that airdrop helped bring everyone at once. 2. Some of them say that solana has improved greatly since this whole discussion began, and that nobody has gone back and tried to build a better perp dex from the ground up now that landing rates are better. They think you can make a lot of progress now that landing rates are better. Phoenix is already doing this + using CUs to try and priortize makers vs takers. Hoping this inspires others to try. 3. All of them so far agree that the scheduler war is probably as big of a problem as anything. They cannot build efficient quoting strategies because it changes from slot to slot. Some of them only do spot, and do not touch perps at all. Others only quote on some slots. Spot is easier to just shut off when things don't favor them, and tons of retail spot traders on solana. You can't do that with perps because of liquidations which is why some don't quote. 4. They all seem to agree that fixing microstructure is not a silver bullet, and HL is winning for other reasons you mentioned. HIP3, Marketing, Being seen as THE venue. So on top of microstructure, we need more teams building better products. 5. Fees are too high, and opaque. 6. Most makers will not quote tight or provide deep liquidity on perps without predictability + cancel priority and oracle update priority. Predictability (MCP) gets us a lot of the way there. Makers will figure it out. IMO the microstructure narrative is a tiny bit overblown but definitely more important than 5% and we do need to fix it to be competitive. And yes we need more retail and more traders, but like I said, its chicken and egg. Those traders need better prices, and makers give it to them. If we end up with MCP + Guaranteed priority fee ordering + Blocks getting bigger, then priority fees don't hurt makers too bad during congestion, and ordering after that ends up being by CU. So oracle updates and cancels naturally float to the top. I am super bullish ACE, but afaik, this breaks composability, one of our major strengths. How do you compose between protocols when two apps have different ordering rules? I'm not 100% on this though. I think MCP needs higher priority in the roadmap, so it immediately gives makers the ability to predict each slot and create better quoting strategies. Sorry for the long ass message. As you can see I've been thinking about this a little bit.

A sniper does not fire because he has been lying still for six hours and wants it to be worth the wait. He fires because the conditions are met. If they are never met, he goes home with a full magazine. That is not a failed mission. That is the mission.

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