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From Harvard at 18 to Building Crypto's Fastest Exchange | Vlad, Lighter

1h 5min

Vlad Novikovski, founder of Lighter, shares his journey from winning math and physics Olympiads to building a next-gen decentralized exchange. He discusses his early talent discovery, finishing Harvard at 18, working with Ken Griffin, and how his background in high-frequency trading and data science led to Lighter—a perp DEX using ZK proofs for speed, security, and verifiability. The conversation highlights the importance of connections from Olympiads, the strategic pivot from Lunch Club during the 2022 crypto winter, and how traditional finance may adopt this technology incrementally.

Summarized by Podsumo

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✨ Key Takeaways

1

Vlad finished Harvard in 2.5 years by taking many Advanced Placement classes and six courses per semester, viewing it as a 'pure optimization' to become a paid grad student sooner.
2

He describes his 'aha moment' for Lighter as recognizing that most crypto trading still relied on centralized, non-verifiable systems—despite the underlying assets being decentralized.
3

The pivot from Lunch Club to Lighter in 2022 was supported by VCs, allowing the team to retain 80% of the engineering team through an internal idea competition.
4

Vlad was an early adopter of machine learning and AI, having used it at Quora and in quant trading, and saw the transformative potential of LLMs for homework in 2021.
5

He emphasizes that traditional finance (TradFi) adopts new technologies in small, incremental steps, like ICE's investment in Polymarket to test the waters.

💬 Notable Quotes

"The people I met through Olympiads—some of them are now shaping industries: Dario from Anthropic, Vlad from Robinhood, the first CTO of Facebook. That’s been the most important part."

— Vlad Novikovski
"If you look at it one way, it looks like there's no solution. But if you look at it sideways, you can solve it in two lines. That's the stroke of genius I always loved."

— Vlad Novikovski
"In crypto, you can actually build a product that is both infrastructure and product—not just to check the box, but by its nature."

— Vlad Novikovski