My Full @pacifica_fi Review, Why I Almost Never Gave It a Second Chance & Results "If a tool improves your profitability and your quality of life, you should use that tool." I've written lately about the phenomenon of products going to market and getting hyped too soon, and how that is a disservice to everyone involved. I've tested and written about countless protocols, so when Pacifica first hit the scene, I naturally tested it. And I almost never came back. At that time, individual deposits were capped at a really low amount. That caused one of the few liquidations I have had in my life, because I was unable to deposit more money into my account to survive an unexpected temporary drawdown. After that experience I believed I had written it off for good. Just a few more dollars in the account and that temporary drawdown would have turned into a profitable trade. Because of that bias from being an early tester, I never imagined myself coming back to it. I held a grudge. But when all of the Phoenix hype was going around - another product that got the spotlight before it was ready to receive it - one of my followers mentioned Pacifica again. I honestly came back to it expecting to write a scathing review. I expected to confidently and aggressively explain why it was just another cookie-cutter perp venue that was not special in any meaningful way. Because in the great "perp dex" bubble we find ourselves in most of them are not. With the last thing I liked suffering an exploit, the popular move for me right now would be to simply hate everything that is not Hyperliquid. So for the sake of my social capital, I did not want to like it. But not only did I like it, I have started to fall in love. Anyone who has been hurt in the past knows falling in love the next time is much harder. You are more cautious. You scrutinize harder. You look for red flags in places they do not typically exist. Look, it is not a true DEX. But none of them are. Not from a decentralization purist point of view. It is more like a permissionless CEX working toward becoming a DEX. So while I will pick on this point, it is also basically the entire perps landscape. The first thing I scrutinized hard was security. These are the questions we all should be asking in a post-Drift world. Pacifica solved the Drift vulnerability even before Drift was exploited. I actually have a lot of respect for that. It is one thing for the industry to be reactionary and solve something after the fact. It is another thing for a team to be forward-thinking and solve problems before they arise. That is a good sign. The second thing I studied was liquidity. Surprisingly thick on all of the assets I typically trade. No one will ever compare to the liquidity of Hyperliquid. But what matters to me is not some astronomical amount of liquidity. What matters is whether the exchange has enough liquidity to support my trading sizes without getting wrecked by slippage. And they do. I also pushed the team to tell me more about their market makers. All too often, these exchanges only run with one or two primary market makers. While the team would not disclose the exact number to me, they did give me a ballpark, and it is definitely more generous than a lot of “perp DEXs” carry. That matters, because if your venue only runs on one or two primary market makers, things can go sideways real quick. As I have highlighted recently during my testing, I absolutely love their scale limit order feature. There does not exist a venue-native scale order feature this advanced. Typically, you would have to pay a third-party terminal to get advanced order features like this, which is something I am against doing at my core. But when I first started testing the feature, it only allowed you to scale into positions, not out of them. It seemed like a common sense oversight. I brought this up to the team, and they pushed it live in less than two weeks. I told them their vault page experience was less than desirable. Even though I do not use vaults, when I test something, I test every aspect of it. Once again, in less than two weeks, they pushed an update. Having the features I dream of using native to the venue is so important to me. I have written about this multiple times over the past year. I have begged other protocols that I love to continue to make front-end improvements. But most teams are satisfied with status-quo for user experience and that satisfaction with the lack of continuous improvement is something that really irks me. Having those features presented in a sexy format that is intuitive and easy to use makes the trading experience exponentially better for me. It quite literally improves the quality of my life. And any time a tool can improve the quality of your life in some way, it is a tool worth using. I can accomplish anything I want to do on Hyperliquid. I am not going to pretend those things cannot be accomplished almost anywhere perps are traded. But the experience can take more time, friction, or in some cases offline calculations that impede the workflow. That time and energy matter to me. The reduction of annoyance and friction matters to me. A lot. Maybe it's just from my many years as CEO of a B2C company. Maybe as a result I've inherited a giant pet peeve against friction because I understand the path to on-going to success is to always reduce friction and to never stop obsessing about the customer experience. So while on one hand we have a team that has never stopped shipping - jobs not finished - there do, in fact, remain some unfinished pieces of the puzzle. For most of my trading life, I have never paid much attention to funding rates. 10.95% annualized as a standard is just the cost of doing business, assuming you are betting with the majority. But I noticed on Pacifica that the standard rate was higher and swung more widely, even on some of the majors. I brought this up to the team and suggested they focus on smoothing out and reducing the base funding rate. They said they were working on it. While they have not officially confirmed it has been smoothed yet, my personal observation over the last 24 hours is that the base funding rate, at least on majors, seems to now be industry standard at 10.95%, with far fewer swings outside of standard. That is good, because for a little while there I was seriously concerned about some of the funding rates I was seeing. I suspect the funding rate smoothing process is not fully complete yet, but I can already see visible results. The other areas where I think they need continued improvement are the tradable asset list and advanced reporting & analytics. The asset list is broader than a lot of venues, but not nearly broad enough. ONDO is missing, as one example. I also want to see better reporting. This is something I am a stickler on. Stop lumping realized and unrealized profit together, which is the HL standard. Give people more insight into their trades from an analytics perspective. The more traders can study their own patterns and history using readily available data, the better traders they can become. I am told by the team that both of these outstanding items are being worked on, but they have yet to be realized. I came here wanting to write a negative review because I had developed a premature early-release negative bias. Instead I found myself having a trading experience that was fun and rewarding. If a tool improves your profitability and your quality of life, you should use that tool. I am NOT here to tell you that you should use Pacifica. That is up to you. If you enjoy a good quality of life and profitability using Aster, then by all means use Aster - even though it is my most hated of all. Because your profit and your quality of life are what matter most. I am not ready to leave Hyperliquid just yet. But as I continue on my Pacifica journey, I do find myself starting to shift more and more volume to the venue. I truly enjoy the trading experience and profiting on Pacifica. I only enjoy the act of profiting on Hyperliquid. Those two experiences are not the same. It is my belief that I should be able to enjoy the experience of doing my job. And trading is my job. Now, as an account with followers, every time I either love something or hate something, some jackoff has to ask, “How much were you paid to say this?” And as has been true since the creation of my account on X, the answer will always be zero. I do not sell my voice. And quite frankly, I do not even care if you use things I like or not. It makes zero impact on my life or my PnL. The only thing I have received from the team, other than attentive listening to feedback - which they do with all users - was a temporary discount tier. That is something anyone with established volume on other platforms can be given. I am not special in that regard. After the temporary grace period ends, I will have to earn my discounts like everyone else. So that is my review: not paid, not sponsored, not blindly bullish, and not pretending the product is finished. Pacifica still has things to improve. But the direction of travel matters, and right now I see a team listening, shipping, fixing, and building with a mindset of constant improvement. I came back looking for reasons to hate it. Instead, I found a venue that made trading feel enjoyable again. 🫡 From the depths — The White Whale 🐋
