GRTiQ Podcast: 206 Tristan Frizza

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Tristan Frizza (00:00:14):

And I think Anatoly actually mentioned this to me exactly, which is kind of humbling to hear. He said, “Some days I feel like a complete idiot and some days I feel like a genius,” and that, “I’ve sold everything essentially.” Even for the big guys, I think they feel this imposter syndrome where they kind of flip flop a bit in between these two states.

Nick (00:01:07):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Tristan Frizza, the founder of Zeta Markets. Zeta Markets is revolutionizing decentralized derivatives trading on Solana, building high-performance infrastructure that combines centralized exchange speed with DeFi security. Through their innovative Layer 2 solution, Zeta Markets is also working to make institutional grade trading accessible to all users. With a background in robotics engineering and machine learning, Tristan previously developed AI models serving millions of users at Atlassian. His unique experience combining distributed systems and deep learning has proven invaluable in tackling DeFi’s most technical challenges. During our conversation, Tristan shares insights on scaling through market cycles, the evolution of decentralized infrastructure, the origins of Zeta Markets and its long-term vision, and his vision for the future of on-chain trading. I started the conversation with Tristan by talking about his experience working in Silicon Valley’s machine learning industry, and then his transition to crypto.

Tristan Frizza (00:02:14):

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me on the podcast. This was quite a while ago. That was actually a few years after I’d graduated. I went and worked in Silicon Valley. I’d actually kind of started in crypto prior to that, I think just kind of trading on the side, but decided to get a real job and work in the industry. I’d been working on deep learning for a couple of years. That was kind of my passion, alongside some of these distributed systems and crypto stuff towards the end of my university time. I actually ended up doing my thesis in deep learning, mostly on generative AI, which is now kind of the hot thing or it’s become the hot thing. I worked at Atlassian for a couple of years, which was really good to just operate in a big company, see how that works, also see the flaws and the difficulties of scaling a really big organization, which I think definitely informed some of my knowledge and my learnings going into the startup world.

(00:03:08):

But in terms of the machine learning stuff, that was super interesting. It was at a time where I think we were in the pre-GPT phase. I was playing around with some of these language models, and doing other kind of recommendation systems that I think were still very kind of new and things were changing quite a lot. I mainly decided to make the pivot to startups, not necessarily because of crypto itself but because I really wanted to take on a new opportunity. I’d worked in this big company. It was a lot of fun, and I got to deploy basically machine learning models for tens of millions of users, which I think is a really rare opportunity that early in your career. It was really exciting at the time, and I’d always kind of wanted to move from Sydney to Silicon Valley because there’s just a lot more tech stuff happening.

(00:03:55):

So yeah, I decided… After I’d been there a couple of years, crypto was starting to pick up. I’d missed the entire DeFi summer and smart contract wave, and that kind really appealed to me. And seeing some of the innovation happening on chains like Solana, I decided, “Hey, I’m in my early to mid-20s. This is a really good time to take on the startup. If I get into my 30s or older, I don’t think I would have the kind of resilience or…” It’s very hard at that point in your life to kind of stake it all and go and do a startup, and so we were going into a bull market. It was actually a really good time to raise and to find co-founders and get started, and that’s kind of why I decided to take the plunge.

Nick (00:04:32):

You have this unique perspective on both industries, right? I know that AI goes back a lot of years, and I’ve had some people on the podcast that remember the very early days. But if we think about it in terms of public adoption and public interest, AI and blockchain and crypto, they almost seem like they’re running parallel in terms of growth and interest in getting the attention of the public at large. So the question is, having been a part of the AI, deep learning, machine learning wave early on and now jumping into crypto, you have this unique advantage of being able to see how industries grow and scale and reach adoption, as you look at that then and use the framing from your own background, how would you sort of contrast or compare where we are in terms of the crypto industry and what happened with AI?

Tristan Frizza (00:05:23):

It’s interesting. I definitely think there are parallels. I will go out there on record and say I think AI has still kind of managed to prove that it has significantly more utility than crypto at the present stage. I use it in a lot of aspects of my life, for coding. I use it as kind of an assistant if I want to plan my holidays. There’s so many things it’s really great at. It’s obviously used in search and a bunch of other things, so I think it just has incredible utility. Crypto has always struggled with finding utility, but I think a lot of use cases are coming to light. And I’m obviously just very optimistic about DeFi and overhauling the traditional financial system. I think where we’re getting to with Layer 1 and Layer 2 technology, things are accelerating really quickly to a point where it is actually becoming mass adoption.

(00:06:09):

I think you are seeing this happening right now on Solana, which is very cool. In the AI world, I think it was a very fringe thing. There were a couple of people doing research, but I would say it was definitely not something that everyone and their dog was kind of talking about back in the day. What I was working on, I would run meetups and I would give talks in Sydney especially, and there was just literally no one paying attention or very few people that deeply understood what was going on. And then, we hit the ChatGPT moment. That comes out. And then the next week or a couple of months down the line, everyone on the street is starting to talk about AI. Everyone’s got it in their pocket, everyone’s using it. It was just kind of like a breakthrough moment. And I don’t think it was even the models that necessarily got better. GPT-3 was very impressive, obviously. But I think the fact that they managed to layer it into this very user-friendly app, this chatbot interface, that was what brought it to the kind of end customer.

(00:07:00):

I think crypto has gone through a similar thing. If you think about the old days, Bitcoin and Ethereum, these things, you have to be pretty expert on what you’re doing with cryptography to understand what’s going on, what messages you’re signing, how to use a ledger, understanding gas fees and transaction signers and all this kind of stuff. It is quite complicated for a regular person. I’ve tried to get people in my family into crypto or some of my friends, and it just… Maybe they can go and buy Cardano on Binance or something, or other. But if they’re going to use on-chain stuff, it goes completely over their head. I think we’re kind of starting to get to the precipice there. It’s been really cool. Especially, recent events with the Trump token, and Moonshot and Jupiter now basically in the top five iOS apps along with Fantom, that is just pretty mind blowing to me.

(00:07:49):

It’s very cool to see with this kind of adoption so many new people coming in using on-chain for the first time. On-chain is actually generally pretty usable other than the occasional spots here with Solana congestion. But yeah, you really need to click one or two buttons, buy the token. The gas fees are kind of handled in the background, priority fee settings. People don’t have to worry about how exactly you are swapping. It just starts feeling like more of a Robinhood or fintech interface that people are pretty aware of. Everyone has a banking app and can kind of use that. This is just kind a much nicer version of that, and so I think it’s really cool. I think now that we’re getting… I forgot how many active users Moonshot has now. It was at least a couple of hundred thousand if not a million, which is pretty nuts. It probably still pales in comparison to ChatGPT and similar applications, but I think the adoption curve is really starting to accelerate now.

Nick (00:08:43):

When it comes to adoption, you’ve made the comment in other interviews that if professional traders are still using centralized exchanges in 5 years, we’ve failed as builders. This is a little bit controversial in the sense that, I think, some people always think that centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges will coexist. So, how come you’re taking such a strong stance on that?

Tristan Frizza (00:09:05):

I think there will definitely be some nature of them coexisting. I think it’s inevitable that both are there. But I think from my perspective, I take a pretty strong stance obviously building in DeFi because I think DeFi is fundamentally a better settlement layer. The real disappointment for me is… We came out with Bitcoin, which is this incredibly decentralized digital currency. Everything is kind of proven through cryptography, and then we’ve had essentially these organizations pop up who allow you to trade digital assets but are entirely custodial. They hold onto your assets. They probably don’t have necessarily the security practices as seen by all the various hacks and collapses of these organizations, and I think it just leaves too much room for operator error and human error for things to go awry. I think when incentives are kind of skewed with people making a lot of money in crypto, for example with FTX and stuff like that, things can go wrong and people can lose a lot of money.

(00:10:06):

I think the beautiful thing about DeFi is it’s almost like the Google parable, which is like it can’t be evil essentially. Everything is put into smart contracts. If you open source that, everyone can read through the logic, everyone can verify. You basically prevent fraud at the root there. Everything is cryptographically verified. People can kind of do things and expect that these functions and these smart contracts operate as expected. And I think it was really cool when the market has crashed in previous cycles, all the DeFi liquidations go off, “Bang, bang, bang.” As the prices go down, everything is kind of systematic and works well and people are able to withdraw their funds when they want to. They’re able to self-custody, and always have access to that. It’s a big reason why I basically hold the majority of my funds on chain. I barely use, if at all, centralized exchanges anymore because I just feel much more trust in being able to own my own assets, especially with trustworthy DeFi platforms that have been audited that I know the founders, that are kind of high reputation teams.

(00:11:07):

I think in the next couple of years, I want see the transition and the pendulum swing in favor of DEXs, and I am seeing that shift. If you look at centralized exchange CEOs, I think the CEO of Bybit recently was saying, “The future is DeFi.” They’re trying to double-down on DeFi, so I think these guys know that their time is somewhat coming and that they need to get a move on with this stuff. Whether they really build something that is innovative in DeFi or it’s just a wrapper, we’ll have to see. But I think it’s good that that is the sentiment, and that’s just the direction that everyone’s pointing towards. Once these applications and layers actually get fast enough, I just don’t see that there’s going to be a massive trade-off. If you can get similar performance and you’re sending transactions and they take a few milliseconds or even a few seconds, and you are self-costing and you are getting the security, I think it’s just a strictly better way to use crypto.

Nick (00:11:57):

As you mentioned earlier, you are from Sydney, and I always like to ask a little bit of a question about my guest’s background. What can you tell us about growing up in Sydney, a little bit about your background, and how you sort of got interested in technology?

Tristan Frizza (00:12:11):

Yeah. I grew up in Sydney pretty much my whole life. It is a little bit of an isolated island in the middle of nowhere, in Australia, from the rest of the world. But the nice thing about Sydney is it’s a great place to live. I think it is also somewhat of a finance hub. And it’s interesting if you talk to a bunch of DeFi founders, there are a lot from Sydney. Kain from Synthetix is from there, and Sid from Maple. I think the Derive guys are also from. There are a ton that I’ve bumped into or met overseas essentially who all kind of heralded from there, which is really cool I feel like, especially from the DeFi crowd, which is really nice. That’s been good. What sparked my early interest in technology? I had not programmed unlike some prodigies out there in crypto. I wasn’t programming when I was 13. I very much picked it up while I was in university.

(00:12:55):

I decided to study engineering because I was very interested in… science and math was kind of my jam. I decided to study robotics in university because I thought it was a nice mix of the kind of hardcore stuff, which is mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and you get to do some software stuff. Initially, I was not super keen on software engineering because I kind of had this weird impression or bias in my mind that you’d just be a nerd sitting in front of a computer and it’s not going to be that fun, and you just spend a lot of time in front of a screen. And then, what do you know? That’s kind of what I end up doing every day now, so it’s kind of funny.

(00:13:33):

My kind of unlock moment was when I took my first computer science class. It was actually in MATLAB, which is this janky mathematical computing language, which engineers used to kind of do fluid simulations and other kind of physics simulations and other things. I was terrible at it when I started. The first couple of weeks, I started writing code, and it just wouldn’t work, and I was like, “Man, I’m really terrible at this.” And then somehow, it just clicked for me essentially. I don’t know what happened, but I just kind of realized coding is just like a recipe. It’s almost like you’re baking a cake. You just give the computer the instructions, it runs through them, programmatically executes them, and it does what you want. And for me, that was just this mind-blowing moment that I’m like, “I just control or I can kind of instruct this device essentially to do whatever I want.” Ever since then, I started learning Python, some of the scripting languages, learning C and C++ essentially for some of the robotic stuff.

(00:14:29):

It was really cool that I started using it in my personal life that I’m like, “Oh, if I want to just automate something or write a script…” I felt like it was this superpower. Talking to some of my friends who were non-technical, they’re like, “Oh, I need to get emails or I need to buy concert tickets, and it’s really hard,” and I’m like, “Oh, you could just write a Python script in 30 minutes, and you could programmatically do it. You could scrape the web, and you can do all this cool stuff.” And then after that, I was just like, “Man, I’m super red-pilled on software and technology,” and decided that I wanted to keep my career on that.

Nick (00:15:00):

You alluded to this earlier, but you said while at university in around 2017 is when you sort of became first interested or aware of crypto. Take us back to that. What was that event? What was your first impressions of crypto at that time?

Tristan Frizza (00:15:14):

Yeah. That was a couple of cycles ago. When crypto started picking up again, I didn’t know too much about it. I very much came at it as an outsider, I would say. You see it advertised on the bus stop. If someone says, “Bitcoin at all-time highs,” you’re like, “What the hell is this Bitcoin thing?” You start hearing it on the TV, people are talking about it, which I imagine is kind of the typical experience for 95% of people, and so it was interesting coming from that kind of perspective. That’s why I kind of understand what it is for a newcomer first coming into crypto. And then you start reading up on the altcoins, what’s kind of happening there. I was just kind of dabbling and getting a bit interested. Back in the day when I actually used Facebook, I was in this Facebook group, one of these typical crypto investing group. I was just looking through some posts and just trying to learn more about it.

(00:16:02):

And funnily enough, a friend of mine, who actually wasn’t a friend at the time but we had a lot of mutual friends, kind of reached out to me because we were in the same group. He knew a lot of my high school friends. He just got in touch with me and he is like, “Hey, I kind of muck around with crypto, and I kind of invested in some stuff. Do you want to partner up and do some research, or invest in some things?” He was a really cool partner. We jammed on that kind of stuff. He actually sent me basically my first altcoins. I think it was like Waltoncoin or something all the way back in the day, which is one of these tokens that absolutely tanked, that we all lost a lot of money on. But he sent me 2, $300 or so… At that time in university, that was mind blowing for me. I’m like, “Whoa, that’s a lot of money for me.”

(00:16:42):

It was really cool and I was like, “Oh, so generous of him.” He kind of had a finance background, so he taught me a lot about investing. And I had the technology background, so I would write scripts and trading bots and stuff like that. We ended up doing research for a year or two. The market crashed, and we kind of got rinsed a little bit on that. We made a bit of money, and then lost a bunch. And then unfortunately, his kind of interests died out and he went back to banking. And then I got my normal job, but I always had that in the back of my mind that it actually pushed me to take a lot of my final year courses around cryptography, distributed systems, and actually learn what was happening under the hood. Because when I was doing a lot of this investing, it’s just like look at the coin that’s pumping on CoinGecko, look at some of the TA indicators, start trading it late at night.

(00:17:29):

I was doing all this day trading and it was kind of stressful, and kind of realize at that point that I probably don’t want to do day trading because you’ve just got to be on screens 24/7. It’s a very stressful job. You got to learn how to divorce your emotion from your trading strategy, which was definitely a challenge. But yeah, I think it kind of gave me this peer under the hood that’s like, “What’s actually happening, and how do you build these systems? How does proof of work or proof of state consensus work?” And I think that really informed me to become a founder or a builder in the industry later on.

Nick (00:18:03):

Was it a singular moment or a reading of a specific white paper that was the unlock on the underlying technology, and how it was sort of different from traditional tech? Or was it more of a gradual evolution for you whereas you moved away from speculation into, like you said, under the hood tech and what it means for the world?

Tristan Frizza (00:18:24):

Yeah, it’s a good question. I kind of remember reading through parts of Bitcoin white paper in the early days, and there were definitely some pretty interesting things. But a lot of terms still hadn’t crystallized for me, and it was only when I took those courses. I took a really good course in my final year on distributed systems, and one of the projects was building a proof of work blockchain. I actually learned, “Here’s how you set up the nodes, here’s how you set up blocks and embed the hash of the previous block,” and I was like, “That’s very cool.” I was hands-on, had built my own very crappy proof of concept blockchain network, which was really nice. Actually, my lecturer had been building his own kind of startup and high speed. I think it was proof of stake network at the time, which was really cool. That was kind of a nice introduction there.

(00:19:07):

Given I took that break, when I came back, I found Solana essentially. This was late 2020 essentially when no one was talking about it. They’d only just published some very basic medium blogs and they were like, “Hey, we can do 50,000 TPS.” And I remember reading that white paper, and that was pretty nuts to me because it was definitely not a work of art. It was a pretty simple white paper written by Anatoly, but it was digestible. I think I had enough engineering knowledge at that time that I could read through. I’m like, “What is a verifiable delay function? How does proof of history work?”, and just kind of get my head around that and I was like, “Whoa, this is very cool in terms of what they’ve managed to do.” They managed to take traditional timestamps and how you do clocks and timing in distributed systems, which is something that I’d actually done a course on and learned things, and they’ve managed to do this in a cryptographic way. And, yeah, I just thought that was a very cool unlock.

(00:19:58):

I started using the network and I’m like… I was actually fortunate enough that I got to get on a call with Anatoly basically right away. I contacted someone from Solana Foundation and they’re like, “Hey, we’re trying to get builders. No one is using our chain. We’re very new essentially.” They’re like, “Jump on a phone call with Anatoly,” which had probably never happened these days, so I was super fortunate I got to chat to him. We talked for a whole hour just yapping about technology and how they built it. And I was just mind blown because I’d come from 2017 era essentially where there were just BitConnect and all these scams, and you just didn’t trust any of these founders and they were just all very shady. You had ICOs happening, and I had lost decent amounts of money here and there.

(00:20:40):

And then I meet this guy and I’m like, “Wow, this guy is very intelligent.” He’s a Qualcomm engineer of 10 or 20 years. This guy really knows what’s up with cryptography, and is very confident in what they’re building in their design. Yeah, it’s been pretty cool to see that design he had four or more years ago essentially has persisted to current day. They haven’t had to change major things, it’s just tuning and fixing up optimizations on the network, but his original intuition coming from that networking background was really strong.

Nick (00:21:09):

Before we get started on what you’re working on now, to sort of guide people through your personal journey, you spent after-university time at Atlassian, as we talked about the beginning on machine learning. You worked starting as an internist, and had several different roles before you left and went to work full-time into crypto. How did that experience sort of working there and working on those projects prepare you for life in web3 and being a founder?

Tristan Frizza (00:21:38):

I would say that wasn’t even the best experience to me as a founder because I had worked in startups prior to that. Essentially, while I was still in university, I was like, “Hey, I need job experience, and Google wouldn’t hire me because I was too young. They would only hire people in their final year.” But I kind of felt this compulsion essentially because I’d been doing all this work and I had this existential worry that, when I graduate, I want to find a really good job and be working in a career that I’m very passionate about. I don’t want to just be working in some bank or consulting company doing something that I hate. So, I very much felt the urge to start my career early and start making steps towards that, because I’d kind of been getting interested in startups and entrepreneurship and hung out with some people like that. I think those experiences was pretty formative.

(00:22:24):

I worked in a startup accelerator at one or two companies, essentially there mostly doing fintech stuff. That’s where I learned about a bunch of more programming stuff, how to do databases and SQL stuff. I learned data science, I learned AWS cloud stuff that I would just never learn in my university course, so it was really nice. I learned a lot about that. I was also kind of tended to be the first employee or very early employee at these very small companies, like 3 to 5 people, and so it was really nice that I was in there in the trenches. I wasn’t necessarily going and raising money or doing some of the founder responsibilities, but I was kind of adjacent to it. I was exposed, I was kind of seeing what was happening.

(00:23:03):

So, I had a bit of, let’s call it, two or three years of just working on and off in startups, which is pretty cool. And then, I kind of rounded that out. Working at Atlassian, at a big company, that was really good that I got to work on. Basically, my whole team had all PhDs in statistics and machine learning, which is really nice. So I got both things, the scrappy startup world and then working in the big company world and doing more kind of research and R&D stuff. And then having seen both of those, that was really nice coming into the startup. I was like, “Okay, I understand that you have to be scrappy in some of the kind of rules in the startup.” I had to learn how to do fundraising and pitching and getting the word out there about the startup, which was a new learning as an engineer and someone that doesn’t typically do that.

(00:23:46):

But then, I think it was nice hiring people and structuring the team. I could take a lot of the learnings that I had from Atlassian on how they ran their teams, team size, hiring practices, culture stuff. The big thing was we obviously wrote project management tools. I know a lot of people hate Jira, and I didn’t work on Jira, so I’m just going to say that. But it was really nice that I learned how to do Agile stuff, project management because, when we started, I think it was very, very ad hoc. People would not be across what other people were working on. You have to be very intentional about communications and deadlines and how you ship stuff. And I think in a very early stage of a startup, that is complete chaos.

(00:24:25):

But as we started to formalize these practices, we started hitting our velocity and our cadence and actually moving a lot faster. I’m very glad that I didn’t come fresh in from university or fresh in from startups, and do this from scratch. I’d seen some of the best practices from some of the leading Silicon Valley companies, and being able to adopt some of those without some of the hierarchies and other big bloated things in organizations, and try and tailor that to a startup.

Nick (00:24:51):

One of the things that you’ve sort of explained as a pivot moment for you was participating in a Solana hackathon, and it’s already become clear that you caught the vision for Solana. You met Toly, had an incredible conversation there, so it’s clear why your story might end up in the Solana ecosystem. But take us back to that hackathon. What was that experience like, what were you working on, and what made that a pivotal moment for you?

Tristan Frizza (00:25:17):

Yeah. I guess at that point, me and my co-founders at the time all just kind of took leave from our jobs. We had been just kind of whiteboarding and mucking around and thinking about how to build this thing. And then, we started essentially just building the MVP and mucking around on that. It was pretty cool that we just managed to build this essentially in our co-founder’s living room. I just slept on the couch, and we just ended up hacking together a really crappy prototype for an options exchange. And that options exchange, basically, we managed to launch in three weeks. It didn’t work with real money or anything, it just was kind of like a proof of concept. It was very much sticky taped together.

(00:26:00):

We managed to get that out there, show it to a bunch of judges who seemed to really like it. Out of the 13,000 teams there, they decided to award us with the prize, which is pretty cool. And I knew at that point, I was like, “Okay, we got something here. We can kind of prove that we built something.” We learned enough about some of the underlying technology and we decided, at that point, “Let’s give it a stab, and let’s see what we can do with it.”

Nick (00:26:22):

In that sort of traditional founder’s journey, talk to us about what you’re thinking about this time. What are the problems? What’s the problem set that you sort of identified and started forming a thesis of, “Hey, we can add value here. This is a problem or a gap in the market”?

Tristan Frizza (00:26:39):

Yeah, good question. I think we looked through a lot of… Because this is when Ethereum DeFi was the thing, there was nothing else basically. It was really only Ethereum Layer 1 DeFi, which was, if people have used it, very slow. For me, coming in and using Uniswap and having to pay 5 to $10 on a swap fee if not more, with the pretty small stack that I had at the time, plus the gas fees and just the spreads that were on there, it was not super impressive, but I was impressed by Uniswap itself. I looked at the smart contract code, it was 70 lines of Solidity code. I was like, “Whoa, this is mind blowing that someone has built something that does a billion dollars of swap volume for what is just a couple of lines of code.” That was pretty mind blowing.

(00:27:21):

Solidity, coming from a bit more of a programming background, is not too complicated. It’s kind of like a JavaScript-y, Python-y type syntax. It was easy to get your head around it and kind of understand the logic there, and the logic definitely wasn’t terribly complicated. But then, yeah, I guess from our perspective, we were like, “Hey, we want to build in DeFi.” That just seems like the correct thing to do. We looked at lending platforms, we looked at derivatives, and we kind of landed on options just because one of my co-founders was an options trader at the time and no one had really built anything. There were one or two very fledgling options platforms that were out there and they were, to be honest, pretty unimpressive. You go on there and the spreads are 20% and the fees are $100, and you’re like, “Wow, there’s just no chance at all that anyone is going to be able to trade on this. This is not a real product. It’s just kind of a meme at this point.”

(00:28:14):

Yeah, we saw that there were actually a pretty significant valuation and we’re like, “We can definitely do something better than this. This is crazy if this is the status quo,” and so that’s when we surveyed a bunch of the chains. We looked at what was out there. Solana caught our eye because it was a new thing. It had high performance guarantees and, selfishly, I wanted to learn Rust as a developer. So, that’s kind of why we got started there. We started on the EVM side and just realized it wouldn’t work. It was just far too slow. And then pivoted very quickly into Solana while the dev tooling was awful and everything was manual and kind of terrible to deal with, but we managed to ship something there.

(00:28:52):

I think that’s when Solana DeFi really started picking up in that first wave, and people noticed like, “Oh, you can build actually pretty scalable applications, things that are just simply not possible on the Ethereum side.” We built this options exchange that was a fully on-chain order book, had the margining system on-chain, had the pricing, the Blackshell’s options pricing, that we used for the market prices. I wrote an on-chain implementation for that. There was a lot of work that went into that, and we actually got something working, and it was leaps and bounds better than what we’d seen on the Ethereum side.

Nick (00:29:22):

So, you’re describing the early days of Zeta, which eventually goes on and evolves itself. Talk to us about, first of all, where the name came from and then the evolution of the original thesis to where you are presently.

Tristan Frizza (00:29:36):

Yeah, absolutely. So, the name came from the fact that we were doing options in the early days and we’re actually considering doing exotic options. If you’re familiar with options trading, they have what’s called the Greeks, which are these different risk parameters. It’s your delta, gamma, theta. All these different ones kind of signify different risks with respect to spot price or volatility or time. Zeta is basically the letter Z in Greek, so we decided… Because we’re doing something a bit more exotic on the option side, we’re going to go with Zeta as the name. It kind of sounded cool as well. It was short and punchy. Yeah, we kind of rolled with that. And then in terms of the iterations of our product, yeah, like I said, we came out with this early options MVP, the hackathon thing. We completely sacked it and rewrote it just because it was so bad and so poorly put together.

(00:30:28):

So, we actually relaunched the options exchange with a much better infrastructure. We ran that for close to one to two years, I think, with pretty decent success. We were definitely the most liquid DeFi options exchange at the time. Order book-wise, we actually I think were the first to launch kind of a non-BTC, non-ETH option. So, we had Solana options. These weren’t available on Deribit or other platforms at the time. And I think given that Deribit actually listed them after, I like to think that we kind of nudged them in that direction a little bit, which was kind of cool. We were actually pretty competitive with them on some of the prices. And then the whole FTX collapse happened at the time we were actually kind of enhancing or opening up our product suite to perps. We decided, “Hey, you need perps and futures essentially to be able to hedge the options. It’s a really useful product.” Yeah, FTX kind of collapsed at that time, literally three days after we launched the perps.

(00:31:22):

When we launched the perps, they actually did significant amount of volume. There was a lot of traction there. We were like, “Hell, yeah.” Break point is on, we’re in Lisbon, this thing is really kicking off. And then FTX [inaudible 00:31:35] collapses the day after the conference and we’re like, “God.” So, we had to emergency halt the platform just because it was very hard to get liquidity at the time. All the market makers were like, “We do not want to be on Solana. This thing is…” They felt like it was going to zero. They felt like it was going to be all kinds of network vulnerabilities and problems with the network. So, they all kind of yanked and just made it very hard for us to continue running the option side of things because options are very difficult to provide liquidity for.

(00:32:01):

You need to be very sophisticated. There were a lot of markets to be able to provide liquidity over, and so we kind of made the executive decision at that time to just sunset the options. We’re like, “This is going to be very hard to bring back.” We weren’t getting crazy product market fit. We were one of the few in market out there. And that was a big lesson that I learned is, even though there are a few competitors, it’s better to be in a slightly more crowded space I think where there is kind of PMF than try and be the single player in a space that’s still kind of struggling to grow or still kind of undersized. Yeah, basically we fully pivoted to perps. We brought the platform back online and just gutted a lot of the option stuff, tripled down on options on the perps story that we had.

(00:32:43):

And then through 2023, essentially, this was peak bear market. Everyone was hating on Solana. Everyone was like, “It’s an SPF coin, it’s a VC, Inside the Cabal thing. This thing is going to zero. The price went down to $8.” It was peak despair I think for all the developers, and there’s this kind of meme that there were like 75 developers left in the ecosystem. That’s a bit disingenuous to how many people were left, but it definitely taken a pretty big hit. You’d get on those Solana monthly calls, and it was just like 20 or 30 teams left essentially that we’re all talking to each other. Everyone was a little bit depressed of the kind of recent events, but people were still optimistic. People were like, “Nothing has changed about the fundamentals. This network still works really well. We’re still doing more transactions than ETH and every L2 out there.” It’s just kind of a sentiment and narrative shift. And I think we all, for the most part, believe that, once the tables turned, things were going to come back in a big way, and they did.

(00:33:42):

So yeah, we just continued putting our heads down throughout the bear market and just redoing a lot of parts of our platform. We re-architected a lot of things, rewrote it to be much more scalable, much more efficient. Thank God we did because the bull market rolls around in early 2024, Jito and Jupiter do these airdrops. Suddenly, it’s this kind of catalyst event that massive amounts of liquidity and airdrop farmers and users start flooding through the bridges back into Solana. Because we’d re-architected and we’d redone our platform quite significantly, we went through this incredible growth spike where we went from a few thousand users during the bear market to basically a peak of I think 150,000 users, which was pretty insane.

(00:34:24):

Even though we’d made the refactors, I remember being up on a Saturday night at 2:00 AM. Our order book had gone down or something or other or had just been slammed way too much because we just had this massive growth spike. The user numbers I was looking at the dashboard were just going through the roof. It went up tens of thousands every day essentially, and so it was cool. We were just fighting fires, trying to work with Solana congestion of priority fees that were really broken at that time. That kind of year was just really trying to scale to the demand there, which is really cool because we learned a lot about, “Now that we have a lot of users, how do we build the business model of the exchange? How do we work on the growth side to attract and retain more of these kind of users?”

(00:35:03):

So, it was kind of nice that the technology was there and we went into growth mode and we didn’t have to ship crazy amounts of features, and now it was just focusing on stability. And then I guess, coming out of that, it was good we got all these users, but it was really hard to sustain I guess the trading experience that we’d had just because Solana network congestion had just been such a thorn in our side, and there was very little that we could do about it because the fee markets are pretty opaque and non-deterministic. There are just a lot of things that we don’t have control over on the Layer 1, and this affected Jupiter, Jito and Camino and every platform kind of under the sun, especially the ones that I think rely on pretty fast transactions. So, it tends to be derivatives and swaps platforms I think really kind of suffer from…

(00:35:49):

When the price goes down, there’s this kind of reflexive event, price goes down, all these on-chain liquidation bots essentially happen, clogs up the chain, chain gets more congested, which means more liquidations struggle to go off, which means there’s more spam, and you just kind of start this cycle where the network gets sort of crippled at that point. We saw it sort of happen with the Melania-Trump launch the other day as well. I think there was some kind of issues. It’s definitely getting better and they’ve made leaps and bounds advances on the network layer, but there’s still some difficulties to be ironed up. At that time, we were basically like, “We want to build this exchange. We want to build something that competes with centralized exchanges.” We got to take matters into our own hands, and so we decided to build essentially a Layer 2 for Solana, which no one had done before.

(00:36:31):

That’s what we’ve been building for basically the last six months, which has been going really well and we’re very close to the mainnet, which is nice and exciting and it solves a lot of the problems. We can get very fast guaranteed transactions through with our own block space. We control some of the congestion and fee markets, which is really nice, and then we periodically settle it back to Solana. We can still run a very performant exchange and matching engine. We can ZK-proof all of that, which is really nice for the kind of trust assumptions there. There’s a very fast bridge from Solana to get there. So, it almost feels like this layer 1.5, I always want to call it. You don’t have to really think about bridging to this completely new ecosystem and getting out there. It’s a network extension, as people like to call it. We think this just solves a lot of problems, and we’re one of the first people to do that. There’s still a lot of design challenges and things to figure out, but we’re coming along pretty quickly.

Nick (00:37:26):

It’s an amazing story and there’s a lot to unpack there. I’m going to do my best with just a couple follow-up questions. The first question is, what was that experience like for you personally going from having a career, being young, but sort of exploring AI, machine learning, deep learning, to getting interest in Solana, speaking with Toly, going to a hackathon, having an MVP by your own admission, needed a lot of work, to going to over 150,000 users and having this amazing product? I mean, what was that like for you?

Tristan Frizza (00:38:03):

Yeah. I mean, the only way to describe it is startups are a rollercoaster ride, and I think you talk to any startup founder and that’s exactly what they say. The more that I think you can build your resilience and make the kind of peaks and troughs of that less severe, I think that just kind of helps in terms of building a longer term business. But yeah, it is really a crazy ride. I think Anatoly actually mentioned this to me exactly, which is kind of humbling to hear, he said, “Some days I feel like a complete idiot and some days I feel like a genius,” and that, “I’ve sold everything essentially.” Even for the big guys, I think they feel this imposter syndrome where they flip-flop a bit between these two states. That’s kind of how it felt. I think the…

(00:38:46):

And actually, one of our investors, Electric Capital, Avichal has this really good framework essentially for startups. It’s like this four-year horizon I guess when you start a startup. The first year is this kind of… I don’t know how to describe it, but you’re kind just very mesmerized by the opportunity. Everything is great. You’re in this kind of honeymoon phase essentially for the first year, and that’s definitely how it felt. We came in. First year, everything is great. You’re learning, there’s so much stuff. It’s blue sky. Everyone’s willing to fundraise for you. It’s very easy. You don’t need product market fit. You don’t need metrics. It’s just about building and shipping the MVP, your pre-product essentially. Everything is great.

(00:39:24):

And then the second year, essentially reality sets in pretty hard, when you’re like, “Hey, I’ve launched the product, it’s getting out there. I’m not getting a lot of traction. I don’t know if I built the right thing.” You start questioning yourself. This was at the time that Luna collapsed essentially, when we were kind of in our second year. So, the market started tanking. We’d launched the product, but we were kind of coming to the tail end of the bull market. Suddenly, we had the technology ready, which had taken us a year to kind of put together, but the market started dying off. So, that was a very hard thing is the market timing actually does somewhat matter. You could have the best platform on Earth, but you could launch it in the peak bear market and there were literally 1,000 users globally on DeFi that would actually be able to use this product, and that was a real kind of shame.

(00:40:07):

And then the third year, essentially, the way he categorizes it is you get the first inklings of product market fit, and that’s essentially what happened for us. Even though it was bear market, we feel like we’d gone through enough iterations of the product that it was actually workable. We weren’t having bugs all the time. The thing was pretty smooth. I’d go and trade on it, and there was a day, I remember, I traded on it when we just shipped a big amount of features or patches and stability stuff. I was like, “Wow, this thing isn’t just breaking or bugging out every couple of clicks.” It’s just all smooth. Everything worked. I was able to use it for an hour and the thing just didn’t have any issues and I was like, “This is great. This feels like a real exchange, real platform now,” and it was nice.

(00:40:44):

We gave it out to some users. They’re like, “It’s really cool that you focus on performance and usability and UX. This exchange is actually pretty well-engineered and pretty superior to some of the competitors that we saw on Solana. It was nice that we were getting that feedback and it kind of felt like, “Oh, we’re on the right track now. We just have to polish some of the edges and just thread the needle there in terms of some of the user requests.” And talking to users was very helpful, getting that feedback, realizing what people really wanted and shipping those features.

(00:41:15):

And then I guess going to year 3.54 was when we hit that big growth spike. Bull market comes back. That’s when you actually start hitting velocity, start getting a lot of users through the door. You actually realize, “Okay, this is what it’s like to have traction and to basically double down on that and keep pushing on that.” Yeah, we’re just trying to roll that through into the new product and go out there with a bang.

Nick (00:41:36):

The other question I wanted to ask you is about the lessons you learned. I mean, that is a rocket ride by anybody’s standards. There’s things you must have learned about how to scale an organization, how to scale a team, how to learn from the market. You spoke to a lot of users and kind of took user feedback to develop the offering. But if you had to distill maybe the most important lesson that you learned on that rocket ride, what would you share?

Tristan Frizza (00:42:06):

It’s really hard. There are a few there. One, definitely people don’t do this enough in crypto, is literally talking to your users. It’s kind of a privilege almost. You are in this direct-to-consumer relationship where you are in this Telegram channel or this Discord channel with your end users and you can talk to them directly. Having worked at Atlassian, we literally would have a separate product or user research team that would go out there and conduct formal interviews, bring typical customers in, sit them down, run through this process.

(00:42:34):

Me as an engineer or working on the data science team, I was kind of divorced from that. I would get some of the notes essentially for that or maybe you could sit in an interview, but it felt kind of detached. Whereas, here, we ship something or we go into the feedback channel and some guy’s like, “I really want to see this stat in the front end,” or, “This button is very hard to use,” or, “The leverage slider is unintuitive,” and we can just go ship a fix that afternoon and people love that. We go out there. We respond to them and we’re like, “Hey, we push this thing,” it works and people love that.

(00:43:05):

The other thing is, as a founder, I think the most important trait is just resilience and just persevering. I think crypto suffers from this short-term bias. People either want to come in and they just want to launch something quick and make a bunch of money, or say you have been building for a while and your token goes up and then you suddenly decide like, “Hey, I don’t really want to continue working on this thing or continue putting a ton of effort,” and so some of these older DeFi projects kind of stagnate. So, you realize that anyone that’s able to build for more than a year in crypto essentially kind of can get to the frontier pretty quickly.

(00:43:43):

It’s harder to do it shorter than that. Maybe you’re a meme coin, you have some successful launch. Usually, these things, I would say from what I’ve seen on a lot of companies, take minimum, let’s call it two years, I think, to really get the ball rolling on things. So, it’s good when people kind of persevere through that and keep building on a longer timeframe. We need more builders doing that and building substantial products there.

(00:44:05):

I think my early reservation or fear was there are so many competitors. We started at the start of a bull market. There were probably 20 perps products. We decided not to do perps, we decided to do options because we’re like, “It’s too competitive. How are we going to beat all these guys?” There’s all these jump guys or other folks trying to launch their own kind of products. It’s like, “There’s no way we can kind of beat them.” And then we kind of went through a market cycle that basically rinsed literally everyone. It was probably us and let’s call it one or two other platforms that were still alive throughout that bear market, and so it was kind of funny that I think the survival game there is very real and you just have to stick around. It is a long-term game.

(00:44:47):

It’s very hard to be working 100 hours a week for months and months on end. I’ve done it and it definitely burned me out pretty quickly. So, trying to take a longer-term mindset, build things sustainably, build up a company and good people that you have, that you can kind of rely on, and be in a really good position that, when the market does come around, you can fully take that opportunity. I think that’s kind of the method for success there.

Nick (00:45:09):

And then this final question about the evolution of Zeta. You talked about this L2. It’s interesting to me because I’m a non-technical person. So, I’m sort of envisioning you and your co-founders working on this DeFi product or offering and you’re having success. You’ve got market traction. I would think, if I were on that boat, I’d say, “All right, let’s just go deeper and deeper here and just create as much value as we possibly can with this mechanism we’ve sort of created,” and yet you sort of veered off and maybe that’s where I’m wrong. It seems like a leap in my mind to say, “Well, now, let’s kind of do this L2 thing.” Walk us through that, help us connect the dots there.

Tristan Frizza (00:45:49):

Yeah, it’s kind of what I mentioned before and it’s definitely not a leap. This thing is very much like a logical progression. My strong belief, and I think it’s held by a lot of other founders in this space, is most major apps will tend to become their own app chain or own more of the infrastructure stack and vertically integrate. And that was motivated by the fact that we had built this platform and a lot of the performance issues that we had were kind out of our hands with Solana. We couldn’t control the congestion. We didn’t have too much discretion around the block space that we had. The block times, we can’t change. They’re 400 milliseconds of Solana, which is pretty damn good by blockchain standards. But for high-frequency trading, it’s still like, “Why is magnitude too slow?” So, it was very hard to bring a product to market, this fully on-chain exchange that was competitive with something like a Binance or even a Hyperliquid these days, and those guys make the trade-off.

(00:46:44):

Hyperliquid, they’ve built a great product, but it kind of makes the trade-off that it is a smaller validator set. You can kind of co-locate and have very fast messaging. That’s impossible with Solana, right? Solana is meant to be this global unified state machine all around the world, right? [inaudible 00:47:01] knows communicating… There’s the speed of light that limits… Toly loves to talk about this. We’re charging against the speed of light and that’s kind of what FIDAs and all these things are trying to do, but there is fundamental physical limits on this. So, that kind of model, very hard to build a high-performance trading exchange on a general purpose chain. Solana is incredible for basically anything that you want to put on there, but we had this very specialized use case for trading and purpose trading.

(00:47:27):

We decided owning that infrastructure stack was important, but we don’t want to go and build a Cosmos app chain or something that is in a completely different ecosystem because our user base is on Solana. We still believe it’s the best base layer that’s going to scale very well, that’s going to have the most assets and the most liquidity on there. So, we want to be very close to that essentially. Its Layer 2 or this network extension that we’re building is essentially that, it uses a lot of the security and we can have a lot of the tokens bridged in very quickly from Solana. And then, we essentially run this order book computation off chain. We ZK-verify it, and then we post this proofs back to Solana.

(00:48:10):

We’re still using Solana essentially, but we’ve taken out the execution, that SVM component. We would board that off chain. We start running it in our own environment where we can run it way, way faster. We can do thousands of TPS, we can do a very low latency, so like five milliseconds essentially, and we can kind of prove all that and settle it back to Solana. And that really enables us to go much, much further, compete head to head with some of the big exchanges, and deliver something that is really groundbreaking experience. So far, you haven’t seen that on Solana. The existing purpose exchanges still struggle with liquidity issues. They’re still kind of slow and, when the markets or the network gets congested, essentially you can’t get off orders and you can’t trade other positions, which I think is very concerning when you are dealing with tens or hundreds of millions of open interest.

(00:48:58):

Our solutions should definitely be something that makes some trade-offs in terms of the composability. With the Layer 1, we can’t necessarily integrate with Jupiter atomically, which is a real shame. But because we don’t have to deal with too much physical collateral, it is kind of perps, which are derivative, we’re happy to take that trade off for performance and for speed.

Nick (00:49:18):

So, if we zoom out a little bit here, what are some of the big next things that Zeta is going to work on and prioritize? For any listeners that want to learn more and get active in that community, what can you tell us how to do that?

Tristan Frizza (00:49:30):

Yeah, sounds good. We are kind of on testnet with that at the moment. Our Layer 2, where we call that bullet, and essentially Zeta will be the first application on that. Both are on kind of testnet right now. We’re just kind of working with a small group of testers. So if anyone out there in the community is a high-frequency trader, does a lot of market-making, or trades a lot of perps, I think, in their free time, we’d definitely love for them to get in contact with us and be kind of early beta tester. That’s been a really good way, once again, to get feedback and iterate the product and build something that people love. And then we’re looking to kind of get to mainnet in the next couple of months. We’re working pretty aggressively towards that and have audits lined up, and we’re pretty much complete with the code base, just figuring out a lot of the kind of stability and making it really robust.

(00:50:16):

That should be out there pretty soon, so would love people to participate and get active in that. I think we’re going to be running a bunch of campaigns and good incentives off the bat. So, I think there’s going to be a real reason to use it. And I think, in any case, if people use it and have used other Solana DEXs in the past, it’s really going to blow their mind in terms of the performance and the kind of efficiency that we get out there. We will be basically building something that is centralized exchange grade or competes head to head with centralized exchanges in a DeFi sense natively on Solana. That was kind of what FTX was back in the day. Everyone would use Solana. FTX is kind of the bridge and where people would put their assets and be able to do a lot of the perps trading. That is obviously no longer, probably for good reason. And now, we can kind of bring some of that experience back and bring spot, perps, and lending altogether in this kind of one DeFi super app and have that natively accessible in Solana.

Nick (00:51:07):

Well, now, we’ve reached a point in the podcast where I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week, and it allows us to get to know you a little bit more. And also, I always hope listeners will learn something new, try something different, or achieve more in their own life.

(00:51:22):

Tristan, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Tristan Frizza (00:51:25):

Absolutely.

Nick (00:51:37):

What book or articles had the most impact on your life?

Tristan Frizza (00:51:39):

This is a bit cliche, but I really liked Elon Musk’s biography. Reading that back in the day, it was kind of a pivotal moment for me because I was going on an exchange program to Stanford, so it was my second time I think ever visiting San Francisco, and this was when I was starting to get interested in technology. I think the first time I visited was just with my parents as a holiday, it didn’t fully click with me, but this time was very much to be in the heart of Silicon Valley and learn what was happening there. So, I read this biography on the plane, Elon, who I admired at the time, but hadn’t fully dug into his life story.

(00:52:16):

I think understanding how he’d approached the company was incredible. This guy would sleep on the floor of the SpaceX factory. He started Tesla and SpaceX and obviously PayPal prior to that, which was just very impressive as this serial entrepreneur and his doggedness and determinism to go and build these things and really change the world there. I felt very inspired. No one had thought about commercial space travel or electric vehicles before in a commercially available sense, and he managed to just basically put that on the map.

Nick (00:52:47):

And how about this one? Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody’s got to watch?

Tristan Frizza (00:52:53):

My favorite movie has always been Memento directed by Christopher Nolan. I think it’s kind a psychological thriller, if you’ve seen it. I think it’s just a fantastic movie, kind of keeps you on the edge of your seat. It’s just the kind of movie that I like, so I highly recommend it.

Nick (00:53:06):

Interesting. If you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Tristan Frizza (00:53:10):

I would choose Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. I have it on vinyl. The first time I listened to it was just kind of a mind-blowing moment and I could listen to that basically on repeat in perpetuity. I think it’s just the richness of the sound in every song is a completely different adventure. If you haven’t heard of it before, you should have. I would highly recommend.

Nick (00:53:32):

What’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Tristan Frizza (00:53:36):

Funnily enough, I think this actually came from my dad, which is kind of funny because I think his biggest regret in life was not pursuing the career or things that he was necessarily the most passionate in. He kind of did his degree in Korea just because the university course was the shortest and the easiest to kind of get through to make his parents happy essentially, but he ended up regretting that. And I would say it was a real shame because he has I think what I would consider engineering mindset, very good with his hands, debugging things, solving problems, but he never got the opportunity to I think take on that career and really exercise those skills in the best ability.

(00:54:12):

His advice to me was don’t do something because it’s prestigious or because you can make a lot of money out of it. I think a lot of my friends went into investment banking or became a lawyer because they’re like, “Hey, this is the kind of hot thing.” And I think I took that non-traditional career path, which is, “Let’s go down the tech route,” which I think, at the time that I started, especially in Australia, was not a hot career at all. And then getting into startups when there was very little happening, getting into AI, getting into crypto before they became really prolific, I think it was kind of cool. And I’m glad I did that because my strong belief has been, if you’re really good at something and you can put yourself in the top 0.01% in the world, I think you can make a career and you can make money out of it. That’s always been my driving belief.

Nick (00:54:54):

How about this one? What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Tristan Frizza (00:55:00):

One thing I would say is, and I’ve kind of learned it myself, I’m not the world’s most successful person by any means, I’ve had a little bit of success, but also talking to other very successful CEOs. For example, the old CEO at Atlassian, he has a really good TED Talk essentially on imposter syndrome. And it was really humbling for me to watch that I think at my time there and see him as a very successful founder with multi-billion dollar company essentially. He still felt like he was out of his depth, that he had this imposter syndrome. He’d get called out at any time, which was kind of nuts. I had similar experiences talking to Anatoly, like I mentioned. Sometimes, he feels like he hasn’t got it. Sometimes, he feels like a genius.

(00:55:38):

These guys always feel this kind of pressure or this feeling that they haven’t made it or they’re not good enough, and I think that really lives with you forever. You can never avoid that. It’s very hard. But there was kind of comforting, in a sense, being a early startup founder in the day and knowing that even the big guys don’t get over this.

Nick (00:55:56):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Tristan Frizza (00:55:59):

I think, for me, the thing I really neglected over the early years of the startup career were definitely sleep and just taking care of yourself. I would just work over 100 hours a week. I would neglect exercise. My sleep was horrible. I’d probably get, on average, six hours of sleep a night and I’d stay up working until 2:00 AM or something or other… All that kind of light just completely disturbs your sleep and you’d wake up the next day super irritable, super tired. If you’re trying to think about technical problems, very hard to get your head around them without a proper night’s sleep. So, I made that change probably a year ago. It was nice in the bear market. I was like, “I think I can afford to actually start sleeping a bit more.” As Brian Johnson and many other people love to say, sleep is the most important thing, more important than exercise, more important than diet.

(00:56:49):

And I started getting routinely more, like seven or eight hours of sleep, made a marked change I think in my life, which is like just a lot happier, a lot more kind of motivated to do work, I could solve problems a lot easier, communication and just working with other people I think was a lot better. I think even though people go through this grind phase and think startups are like, “You got to be at 100%, 110% all the time,” I think you also do have to pace yourself. If you can’t manage yourself, you can’t manage your life, how are you expecting to run a company of 20 or 50 people, whatever it might be? I think starting with yourself and having a really good platform and foundation there is important.

Nick (00:57:28):

Based on your own life experience and observations then, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how people find success in life?

Tristan Frizza (00:57:36):

Yeah, I think I mentioned this before, but I strongly believe it’s perseverance. I don’t remember if it’s Paul Graham from YC or Sam Altman who also kind of echoes this, but it’s really having this dogged determination, especially in crypto where things tend to go through these very short cycles. If you look at people like Anatoly, he wasn’t building this thing for six months and suddenly like, “Oh… [inaudible 00:57:56] happens and Trump happens.” These guys are a big success. These guys have been building for a very long time, I think since 2019. And even by the time we discovered them, they’ve been going for at least probably two years, had struggled to raise money, get any traction, no one believed in them other than maybe Multicoin at the time.

(00:58:12):

So, I think people that are able to think on those multi-year time horizons and are able to, as Solana founders love to say, chew glass essentially, be there in the trenches when things are bad, essentially just keep pushing, get through to the other side, things are going to get better. I think if you can push through that, 90% of people can’t make that. It’s almost like an Ironman or an ultramarathon that you just got to push through and get through to the other side. And once the bear market, for example, finishes, you are going to be one of five people basically remaining on the battlefield, and you’re going to be able to take that opportunity, and you’ll have basically a two-year lead on anyone else that’s out there.

Nick (00:58:49):

Amazing. And then, Tristan, the final three questions are complete sentence-type questions. The first one is, the thing that most excites me about the future of web3 is…

Tristan Frizza (00:58:59):

I would say a global state machine or this globally available computer. That’s the vision that I guess Ethereum and Solana have, computer that anyone can access, that can deploy and run a program on, that is kind of verified by the whole world. I think that’s super exciting.

Nick (00:59:13):

How about this one? If you’re on X, I still call it Twitter, you should be following…

Tristan Frizza (00:59:18):

My handle is Tristan0x and you can also find @ZetaMarkets, Z-E-T-A-M-A-R-K-E-T-S.

Nick (00:59:27):

And then the final question, Tristan, complete this sentence. I’m happiest when…

Tristan Frizza (00:59:31):

I’m learning new things, pushing my boundaries, and being in that kind of flow state. I love learning and trying to further my knowledge on specific things.

Nick (00:59:49):

Tristan, thank you so much for coming on the GRTiQ Podcast, giving some insight into what’s going on in the Solana ecosystem and also your entrepreneurial journey and the cool things you’re working on at Zeta. If listeners want to stay in touch with you, learn more about Zeta, follow the things you’re working on, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

Tristan Frizza (01:00:07):

I think Twitter is the best way. My DM is always open to chat to anyone. We also have a public Telegram group that anyone can drop into and have some messages and engage with us on the team. So, always happy to have a conversation.