Ray Zhang
Ray Zhang

The next test for crypto may not be whether people can move assets on-chain. That part has already been proven many times. The harder question is whether open blockchain systems can support markets that behave with the speed, depth, and reliability traders expect from centralized venues. Ray Zhang is working inside that question as a senior software engineer and backend smart contract team leader helping build decentralized market infrastructure on Solana.

"A perp DEX is not just a trading screen," Ray says. "It is a stress test for whether open infrastructure can handle the hard parts of a financial market."

Perpetual futures have long been one of crypto's most important trading products, but much of that activity has historically lived on centralized exchanges. Those platforms can offer speed and liquidity, but users often give up transparency and self-custody in exchange. The current industry push around decentralized perpetual exchanges is really a deeper question about market structure: can liquidity, margining, liquidations, risk controls, execution, and settlement work together on-chain under pressure?

Ray believes that question matters beyond one product category.

"Derivatives are difficult because everything has to work at the same time," he says. "If an on-chain system can support that, then blockchains are doing more than moving tokens. They are beginning to support real markets."

At Ellipsis Labs, Ray's work is the infrastructure layer where that ambition becomes concrete. The company has built multiple on-chain market-structure products on Solana, including Phoenix (now Phoenix Legacy), a fully on-chain orderbook that has processed more than $75 billion in volume, and SolFi, a proprietary AMM system that has processed hundreds of billions in volume. Ray has also worked on Atlas, an SVM-based blockchain, giving him a deeper view of the Solana runtime, account model, compute constraints, and the tradeoffs developers face when performance matters.

Those details can sound distant from the experience of a trader opening a position. They are not. The trading interface may look simple, but a system like this depends on many lower-level decisions that users never see. Where data lives. How authority is checked. How much compute a transaction uses. What happens when the market moves quickly. How the system behaves when liquidity, risk, and user behavior collide.

"The interface may be the part people notice," Ray says. "But the market depends on the parts underneath it being correct."

Before crypto, Ray worked across startups and helped build consumer systems used by millions of people. That experience shaped his engineering instincts. He learned to ship under real user pressure, make tradeoffs when requirements were still moving, and build systems that had to survive outside controlled environments. Crypto added a different kind of pressure because the systems often touch real funds, transparent state, and adversarial behavior.

At Ellipsis Labs, Ray brought that product-minded engineering background into smart contract work. He designed low-level account-storage patterns that let the team represent complex data structures across multiple accounts, helping work around Solana's account-size constraints. He implemented core permission and authority systems. He also optimized smart-contract compute so the system could remain performant within Solana runtime limits.

That kind of work is easy to underestimate because it does not always produce a visible feature. Yet in a high-performance trading system, these choices can decide whether the product can scale.

"A lot of infrastructure work is about making the right abstraction feel boring," Ray says. "If it works, people do not think about it. But getting there takes a lot of care."

Solana's strengths also create demands. Its performance makes it attractive for financial applications, but developers still have to work within runtime constraints, account structures, and compute limits. A design that looks elegant at a high level may become too expensive or too fragile when it has to run in production. Ray's focus is on turning complex trading, liquidity, and risk systems into secure, performant abstractions that can hold up in real conditions.

That is part of why he sees perpetual DEXs as a proving ground. Derivatives are not forgiving. A mistake in execution quality can affect users directly. A weak risk model can create instability. Poor settlement design can undermine trust. Thin liquidity can make the product unusable. The pieces have to work together, and they have to keep working when the market is stressed.

"On-chain finance cannot only be transparent," Ray says. "It also has to be usable, efficient, and resilient when people are actually trading."

Ray's interest in these systems comes from a broader belief about programming. To him, software is not only a tool for improving an existing product. It can reconstruct parts of the world intellectually by finding the structure underneath a complex system and turning that understanding into something others can use. Crypto attracted him because it applies that mindset to finance, trust, and markets.

That does not mean he ignores the industry's problems. Ray knows many people still associate crypto with speculation, scams, meme coins, and confusing products. His view is that the meaningful response has to come from better infrastructure, not louder narratives.

"A well-designed market should make the rules clearer," he says. "It should make risk more visible. It should give users a better foundation than a closed system where they can only trust what the venue tells them."

His credibility comes from building in that environment rather than commenting from the sidelines. Internally, Ray was promoted in late 2025 to lead the smart contract system, one of the most critical and security-sensitive parts of the production exchange. Externally, he has contributed to the Solana builder ecosystem through a lightning talk at Designing DeFi, a workshop for Solar, the Solana official Chinese community, and judging the Cypherpunk and Frontier hackathon for Colosseum. Earlier, he won the Best Decentralized Identity Project Award at ETH Shanghai 2022 for Def.network, where he contributed as a backend engineer.

For Ray, the near-term focus is helping make Phoenix more mature, feature-complete, and useful for serious traders. That means improving the core trading experience, expanding what users can trade, and making on-chain derivatives feel closer to the quality of professional financial platforms. The longer-term ambition is larger: prove that open, high-performance blockchain rails can compete with parts of traditional finance rather than simply sit beside them.

Legacy finance has accumulated technical and institutional debt over many years. Ray does not believe every system should be replaced for the sake of novelty. He does believe some markets may be better served by infrastructure that is transparent, programmable, and globally accessible from the start.

"If we build this correctly, the result is not just a better crypto product," Ray says. "It is a financial system where more people can see the rules, access the market, and build on top of the same rails."

That is the larger bet behind the work. Perpetual DEXs may be the current proving ground, but the question reaches further. If on-chain systems can support derivatives with real liquidity, strong execution, and reliable risk controls, then open financial infrastructure starts to look less like an experiment and more like a credible path forward.