From my years trading crypto & stocks, running a YouTube channel, a tips group, and managing product at Delta Exchange (the world's #2 crypto options exchange), I've learned a few hard truths:
- No matter the odds, people always want to gamble.
- They avoid obvious gambling like casinos and lotteries because they're "pure luck," but they convince themselves derivatives are a game of skill.
- Narratives around Jim Simons, Nassim Taleb, and endless social media success stories make them believe that if they just keep learning, grinding, and gaining experience, they'll eventually win. So they stay in the loop — even after losing again and again.
- At Delta, the fear and pain of liquidation is massive. Yet because of gambler's fallacy and poor risk awareness, most traders believe: "If I hadn't been liquidated on this trade, I would have made it."
- People still believe there is a direct correlation between leverage and profits — higher leverage = more money.
So I decided to build exactly what this audience craves most:
A protocol that offers the highest possible leverage… with no liquidation.
Why this structure makes sense
- Highest leverage = maximum fees and revenue we can extract from this crowd.
- They're going to lose money anyway. The only question is: who gets it?
- If I charge lower fees, more of their capital flows straight to Jane Street, other HFT firms, and big market makers.
- I want higher fees — so I give them higher leverage, an intuitive UI, perfect triggers for their gambling psychology, and just enough friction to keep them hooked.
The current DeFi reality
Almost every DeFi protocol is just a different mechanism to take money from retail and hand it to:
- Market makers — who trade against retail, win the zero-sum game by being faster/smarter/better, or simply by manipulating prices.
- Protocol builders — who turn the zero-sum game into a negative-sum game by collecting fees.
Most platforms (Aevo, Aori, Hyperliquid, etc.) are essentially closed rooms disconnected from the real world.
Prices are either off-chain, oracle-fed, or determined by orderbooks that big MMs dominate.
If MMs are net short → they let prices drop on the platform.
If they're net long → they push prices up.
The 5–6 largest MMs basically control pricing across Binance, other CEXs, and most DEXs.
My plan
I want to innovate outside that system — build novel DeFi products that don't rely on oracles or orderbooks, so market makers no longer have the structural upper hand.
But let's be clear:
I'm not doing this to help retail or make the world a better place.
I'm not a saint — at least not until I'm rich.
I'm a pure capitalist.
My goal is to make as much money as possible.
Retail traders are always going to lose.
I just want to make them excited to lose, give them the highest leverage, the slickest UI, and unique payoffs they can't find anywhere else — so the majority of that lost money ends up in my pocket.
That's why I built Protected Perps.