The Cat-and-Mouse game of Market Making w/ Rahul Jain

Rahul Jain, Head of Trading at Ellipsis Labs, joins us to talk about the reality of market making on Solana. Rahul breaks down why spot order books fail against toxic makers, how transactional introspection protects liquidity, and the economics of running modern prop execution systems. He dives into the mechanics of Phoenix's new perps platform, managing oracle attacks on illiquid tokens, the structural advantages of owning user flow on-chain, and whether decentralized perps are a winner-take-most game. Subscribe to the newsletter! https://newsletter.blockspacemedia.com Notes: * Firm held 20-25% crypto options market share. * Toxic takers pick off makers for tens of K a day. * Basic prop contracts can make around $1,000/day. Timestamps: 00:00 Start 00:50 Rahul's background 02:45 Why move from spot trading? 06:50 Future of Prop AMMs 09:21 Order book games 14:07 Innovations on the horizon 16:17 RFQ 18:14 On-chain price dislocations 20:04 Why Perps? 25:35 Taker speedbumps 26:29 Market making in TradFi vs Crypto 28:30 MEV 29:39 Deciding assets to quote 31:43 Managing risk 33:16 MCP or bust 34:57 MPC problems 38:00 Why use Pheonix? 40:36 Composability 42:22 Splines 45:22 Scaling the market 47:51 "king making" on Solana 53:58 Are perps "winner take all"? The Gwart Show is sponsored by Ellipsis Labs. Ellipsis Labs builds the most efficient on-chain markets. Their orderbook and Prop AMM products have delivered price improvement to hundreds of billions of dollars in retail volume. Now, they are bringing their expertise to build Phoenix, the best on-chain perpetuals platform. Ellipsis Labs is hiring New York-based engineers. If you're an engineer looking to work with a proven team in making DeFi better, go to ellipsislabs.xyz slash careers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices