"Open-sourcing your code doesn’t mean losing your edge in Web3"
In this Coffee with Calyptus, we sit down with Joshua, the innovative force behind Aori, a platform enabling high-frequency, gas-efficient on-chain trading.
From regulatory hurdles, fresh off becoming a new parent, to moral compasses, this conversation dives deep into the challenges and aspirations of building in useful products in Web3.
Congrats on becoming a father last week! How are you finding it? Feeling okay taking some time away from Aori during this crazy market/period?
It’s been incredible; in the wise words of Shinzo Abe, "have children." Minus taking care of our child, the work never stops, so I cannot. I would recommend all people in crypto to have a child as it certainly changes your perspective for the better on markets in general, in my very short time as a parent.
Aori is pushing the boundaries of high-frequency, gas-efficient on-chain execution. Can you share the biggest challenges your team has faced in building such infrastructure and how you've overcome them?
The hardest part without a doubt is overcoming the sunk cost fallacy. You can work for months or years on a particular product or feature that you think will unlock some amazing market potential for you, then find out that no one cares. Being able to swallow your pride and actually talk to people, satisfy their requests, and solve their problems—that is all you can do. Treat every day like day one, and where your users take you, follow them.
You’re set on open-sourcing operationally viable trading software—an ambitious move in a competitive space. What inspired this transparency, and how do you see it impacting the broader Web3 ecosystem?
Our goal here is to do what Paradigm has done for open-source EVM tooling, but for open-source trading tooling. We believe that having others contribute to our repositories will make them better—not only for all interested in solving but also for improving our solving. We believe the code we’re open-sourcing doesn’t give away any “alpha” of ours, but still allows others to generate their own and cuts out tons of the barriers that slow down or create friction in solving or on-chain market-making.
In a tweet, you mentioned that if someone told Tim Cook about these market-making deals, his first call might be to the SEC. How do you personally reconcile operating in a space where the ethical and regulatory lines are so blurry?
I am confident in my moral compass, and before every decision I make at Aori, I search my heart to see if I believe what I’m doing could be considered immoral or wrong in any capacity. So far, I have done that and am proud of myself—even as I’ve had tough decisions to make and faced temptations to do something that could be in a gray area.
That’s the issue, though, with the last administration’s regulatory stance—they were incredibly hard-lined on U.S.-based crypto companies, driving all crypto offshore, where the trust we have in U.S. courts could not be utilized whatsoever. That means we’re all at the mercy of every individual in crypto’s moral compass, and as we know, humans make mistakes. So what I am most looking forward to is a world where crypto can move onshore to the U.S., and we can trust in that framework rather than relying on every individual building something in crypto. Most importantly, consequences must be enforced.
Solidity Challenge 🕵️♂️
What will be the output at the end of the following sequence of operations and why: addData(25,26,27) -> deleteData(25) -> getData(25,26) = ?
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Solidity Challenge Answer ✅
Answer: The answer will be 27. When deleteData is called, it removes the struct from dataRecords, but the data in the nested mapping (details) remains intact in the contract's storage.
