Zeta Markets Aims to Build a Super-Efficient Decentralized Exchange
Zeta Markets is building the first-ever layer-2 on Solana.
The goal is to re-create the centralized exchange experience in the DeFi realm, making the cryptocurrency trading experience as seamless as possible for users.
While Solana already has high throughput, low-cost transactions, and fast confirmation times, handling that type of activity that centralized exchanges conduct requires a layer-2 solution.
Interview with Tristan Frizza of Zeta Markets
I spoke with Tristan Frizza, founder of Zeta Markets, to get his perspective:
“We want to be able to compete long term with centralized exchanges, bring more people on the chain, have self-custody and transparency as kind of a first-class citizen. Doing that in a fully on-chain environment is kind of difficult. But with L2s, we can take the execution off the chain; we can do really complicated, margining auto-matching with very low latency and thousands of orders per second, and build something that’s a very viable exchange.”
Zero-knowledge proofs are another aspect of Zeta Markets tech that will allow it to scale. When asked about the subject, Tristan responded:
“So that kind of relates to how we’re doing more computation off-chain where we’re trying to scale. We’re doing this execution off-chain to try to make the exchange more performant. With an exchange, we want to have hundreds of markets, essentially, to be able to margin across all of them. This is something that’s like pretty difficult and near impossible to do fully on chain in a smart contract. But if we can take some of that heavy computation off-chain, you essentially compute it all. You can create a proof for that which basically says, you know, I’ve done the correct computation. And so someone can come in there in a very lightweight way, be able to verify that proof and check that this guy is doing exactly what he said he’s going to do. So, this is a nice model for us to balance what we do on-chain and off-chain and still do it in a way that anyone can kind of it can be trustless, and people can verify this computation off-chain. And this roll-up infrastructure will afford us to do that.”
The next logical question becomes: when will users be able to try a working product?
When asked about the test net and main net launches, Tristan had this to say:
“We’re working hard toward the test net launch for Bullet right now. So that will essentially have Zeta as kind of the cornerstone app there. That will be our focus for at least the next six to twelve months to make it really work for trading.”
Tristan noted that Zeta Markets will not be available for U.S.-based users for the time being.
Here’s the full interview: