Cindy Leow - Introducing Drift v3: Built for Outperformance - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Cindy Leo. I'm the co-founder of Drift. And today we're going to be talking about a new version upgrade that we have coming live and contextualize this within the growing perex landscape today. Obviously, the hottest topic in everyone's minds are per dexes right now.

And so I want to quickly talk about what the market looks like today and how drift will win amongst the sea of growing perexes here. So year one year we've seen a huge rise in per dexes. We've gone from $650 billion total volume last year up to $1.5 trillion this year. Trillions.

And market share for perplexes versus sexes has gone from less than 10% to over 26% year-onear. We are seeing that we're hitting record quarters for perex volume, hitting about 900 billion in the last quarter alone. 2025 has been a breakout year for perplexes and we're at all-time highs now. You know, we've been dreaming of this moment since we since we've been looking at perplexes in 2021. Um, we've never really seen the market share for Perpex versus Exus this high before.

And it's validating a true need. It's that trading volume is moving on chain, not just on the spot side of things, but also on derivatives. I'm sure in the last couple of months we've seen a bunch of new perexes popping up left and right. Um, and all of them have been growing steadily. And what I want to contextualize this with two moments in history.

One is in 2020 when we had borrow land protocols. Millions of copycat clone protocols tokens pop up hit billions of dollars in TVL and then vanish overnight. We've seen the same with AMMs in 2021 where after unis swap had proven product market fit for spot swaps. We've we saw millions of copycat clones. Um all the food coin craze pop up 20,000% APIs and all of them vanished over the course of months.

What were the traits of a and unis swap the winners in both categories that created this lasting power and longevity within the barland and amm protocols. If we peel it back, the winning formula for these AMMs and lending protocols were two things. One is a focus on performance and the second is the focus on being fully onchain in a high integrity, secure and verifiable manner. What do I mean by performant? These the the winning protocols were usually the first to the market have brought in true innovations in AMM and borrow lend space were usually the most capital efficient brought you the best execution best prices and on the onchain side they never compromised on being fully verifiable.

So never took shortcuts and uh place a lot of their system essentially offchain. Now I want to talk about drifts and how in this sea of per dexes will we thrive and become the number one winner. To peel it back, drift has been live since 2021. We are currently the largest perex on Salana with over $1.6 billion in TVL, over hundred billion dollars traded since our inception.

We are the only crossc collateral decks in existence which means that you can use any asset as collateral to trade perks. We're natively built on Salana and this has created an ecosystem where all Salana tokens are able to be used as collateral on drift. uh being the perex in the space since 2021 has really shown us that uh the the growth and the TVL growth has come from a massive influx of traders from centralized exchanges coming to seek the same execution and price efficiency as on a decentralized exchange and this is reflected in the TVL chart that we see today. In the last three months, our market share has grown by over 5x. And this has been driven by a huge influx of new traders, new market makers, new high frequency traders coming onto our platform, showing 640% in year-on-year growth.

It's definitely been a breakout year for Drift. And I want to talk about why that's been the case and what we're going to do to to prolong and increase our momentum in growth. In Q4, we're going to be announcing the launch of Drift V3. A lot of the growth and the market share in the last three months has been has been driven by a increased and sustained focus on infrastructure, increasing performance, onchain activity and all of that will culminate in the launch of Drift V3 in Q4 this year. Drift v3 will be built to outperform both Drift V2 and all the other perplexes in existence today.

Let me talk quickly about what drift v3 looks like. Drift v3 will be natively built on chain and salana with the internet capital markets vision. More and more tokens are coming live to Salana today and will be featured heavily as the collateral assets on drift. The second is we're going to be seeing a full new UI overhaul that focuses entirely on speed, liquidity, and UX improvements. We're going to be showcasing uh our crossc collateral model even more closely in drift drift v3.

More assets will be available. Over 40 plus assets and um and many many of the new stable coins that are coming live will be available as collateral on drift. Drift v3 is going to feature many new many new things that'll improve liquidity. The first one being Drift Liquidity Provider token, DLP. What DLP is is a tokenized asset that will enable anybody to provide liquidity on Drift while earning the yields of an onchain AMM without needing any market maker knowledge.

You'll be able to provide the necessary liquidity on BDC, ETH, Soul, and earn a huge yield. On top of that, we are going to be partnering with the largest Salana DATs in the game to be deploying more liquidity and more capital into Drift, into DLP, and across the Drift validator ecosystem. We're going to be unveiling a new orderbook style that will replicate and get our performance even closer to what a centralized exchange looks like without any compromises on the integrity of being fully onchain. And we're going to be working very closely with all of the big scalability changes that's coming to Salana, including JTO's BAM, including Fire Dancer upgrade. And as Salana scales, Drift is going to continue scaling from a performance standpoint.

Um, here are some numbers to to talk about what Drew 3 is is going to look like. We're going to see 10x faster fills. We're going to see 15x faster takeprofits and trigger stop losses. We're going to see five times tighter stop-loss and take-profit execution. Over 10x reduction in latency and also unveiling a new feature called gasless trading by default.

Even though we're going to be fully onchain, as a user, you will never have to pay gas while you're trading on Drift again. Now the big question here is Drift Eye3 is going to be great performant and onchain the two ingredients for the winning per decks. But how does this flywheel translate to community value and the holders of our token the traders on our platform uh two parties that two stakeholders in the ecosystem that are critical to the long-term growth of Drift. We are currently in the midst of passing a proposal where 100% of Drift's revenue will flow back to the community and to token holders. This has never been done before in the space of perp dexes and we are doing this because we care about creating a flywheel where more volume leads to more revenue for the protocol.

that leads to more buybacks for the token and that leads to better value captured by the community as well as to to token holders and traders. So, we're doing this because ultimately this protocol is decentralized by design and the the people who should benefit the most from it are the users of the protocol and the holders of the Drift token. Lastly, we're going to be announcing, and this actually just came live last night, builder codes for community UIs. Back to translating this flywheel for the community. Um, we are now allowing anybody to launch a open-source UI on top of the liquidity that Drift has today where anybody can build a front end that allows you to trade and host perpetual UI.

You can earn all the fees from from trading and use this fees to continue perpetuating the flywheel increasing volume, increasing revenue, increasing buybacks, and bringing that back to the mothership, which is the token. So, if you're a builder and you're uh interested in in working with us for building out your own UI, please reach out to us anytime. Uh this is going to be this is going to be the next big leg of increasing the scalability and the distribution channels for the drift exchange. So I want to cap it off again today by saying that Drift E3 will be coming live in Q4 2025. We in Q in Drift V3 we care about three things.

We care about matching the performance expectations of centralized exchange while never compromising on the onchain elements of what Drift is. We care a lot about delivering value back to community via builder codes via token buybacks. And these three ingredients are the winning formula for a perex. As the Perpex market continues to grow from 26% of centralized exchange volumes today to ultimately eclipsing centralized exchanges, we believe that this flywheel will be how Drift wins. Thank you everyone.