Derive CTO Josh Kim sat down with Nomatic to discuss the path to V3, the trade-offs behind its architecture and his goal of making it easier to build new trading products. Full interview ↓
Several early team members found Lyra while searching for onchain options to solve their own trading problems, including hedging Uniswap exposure. The team has kept building around those practical needs.
Why rebuild?
As Derive grew, the engineers encountered new constraints. Integrators had to navigate custom bridges, smart contract wallets and separate interfaces for the chain and exchange. Adding products meant coordinating changes across those systems. The team designed V3 to reduce that work and shorten the time between identifying a need and shipping a solution.
Why Ethereum and ZK?
The choice of Ethereum comes down to neutrality and durability. Institutions moving substantial capital onchain need a settlement layer they can trust over the long term. Advances in zero-knowledge virtual machines made it possible for the team to write protocol logic in Rust, execute it offchain and verify proofs on Ethereum. Engineers can reuse code across the exchange and settlement system.
The security council remains part of the protocol’s trust model. Under the escape-hatch rules, another operator can take over settlement if Derive leaves withdrawal requests unprocessed beyond the protocol’s timeout.
What comes next?
Looking ahead, the goal is for curators to test vault strategies with a few clicks and for developers to build trading apps with less integration work. The team can explore new assets, including RWAs, within separate risk universes that isolate their risk from core markets.
The broader product direction comes from the demands of options trading. The team added perps because options traders needed hedges, and spot because they held assets they wanted to manage. Lending supports more trading strategies and could enable physical settlement in the future.
