Solana’s nearly $500 million <a href=”https://www.coindesk.com/learn/what-is-defi/” target=”_blank”>decentralized finance</a> (DeFi) derivatives market is getting a new participant, one that’s looking to take a slice of all the other venues’ pies.
Ranger Finance is an aggregator service that wants to be for perpetual futures what Jupiter is to spot swaps: Solana traders’ de-facto homepage for an entire category of on-chain trading.
“We want the Solana ecosystem to compete with your massive decentralized exchange (DEX) players — Hyperliquid, dYdX, Vertex — and currently the best way to do that is via aggregation,” said Ranger co-founder Barrett, a <a href=”https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/08/10/corn-farmers-hedge-their-crops-with-futures-this-solana-dex-wants-vaildators-to-follow-suit/” target=”_blank”>DeFi veteran</a> who also runs the biannual <a href=”https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/02/05/solanas-most-notorious-hacker-house-is-bigger-than-ever/” target=”_blank”>mtnDAO</a> hacker house in Salt Lake City.
Perps (futures contracts that don’t expire) are key drivers of DeFi activity. Most blockchains have their top venue, and Solana, with Jupiter’s perps service, is no exception. But traders seeking to place orders of “significant size” may not be able to find their fill on a single service, Barrett said in an interview.
That’s where the aggregator comes into play. It scans the market across multiple venues and routes orders accordingly, Barrett said. To start, Ranger will plug into Jupiter and the smaller Flash protocol but it plans to add Drift, Zeta and others.
“We are a blue ocean, because there’s no competition” on Solana for aggregating perps, Barrett said.
Ranger’s eight-person team also includes the pseudonymous FA2, a co-founder of block explorer SolanaFM, and Coby Lim, who leads the OTC spot trading desk for Blockchain.com.
Lim said Ranger is going to build additional tooling and trading capacities that institutional investors expect. For now, it’s sticking with the fee-based perps aggregator.
Another plan: Ranger’s own crypto. Barrett, an <a href=”https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/08/03/solana-tokens-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-points/” target=”_blank”>avowedly pro-token</a> founder, said “there will be a token” when asked if the protocol has plans for community governance. He didn’t elaborate on the token’s relation to governance beyond that.
Still, it’s unlikely Ranger will treat tokens like votes and their holders as voters, as nearly every other community-governed crypto project does. Instead, the tokens might sooner have a role to play in futarchy, the markets-based governance model that was <a href=”https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/02/19/the-goal-is-number-go-up-inside-a-daos-radical-governance-experiment/” target=”_blank”>pioneered at mtnDAO</a>.
Barrett said Ranger will aggressively embrace futarchy when the platform inevitably moves to decentralized governance.
“Where futarchy really excels is making sure an organization is moving and implementing in the right direction,” Barrett said.
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