Paradigm co-founder and CEO Anand has revealed how his team rebuilt after the FTX collapse and detailed their strategic push to build Paradex, an on-chain exchange designed to remove the risks of centralized settlement.
Paradigm co-founder and CEO Anand has revealed how his team rebuilt after the FTX collapse and detailed their strategic push to build Paradex, an on-chain exchange designed to remove the risks of centralized settlement.
Speaking on a podcast, he recounted losing personal funds and watching the firm’s half-a-billion-dollar-a-day futures business at FTX “disappear overnight.”
Anand described the period of the FTX collapse as a perfect storm of crises for the firm.
that roughly 70% of Paradigm’s top clients went bankrupt in the FTX collapse, which continues to see legal and financial fallout, including a new distribution for creditors set for September 30.
At the same time, 60% of the company’s own treasury was held at Silicon Valley Bank during its failure, while the USDC stablecoin showed de-peg risk. Despite these massive headwinds, the team chose to keep building Paradex.
Before the push to on-chain, Paradigm had already built a massive institutional trading network.
Anand traced the company’s origins to 2019, when institutional crypto options traders coordinated large block orders in a small Telegram “pit.” He built an automated Request for Quote (RFQ) tool to solve this problem, allowing firms to source deep liquidity without showing their hand on a public order book.
Today, Paradigm averages $1–1.5 billion in daily options flow and has processed up to $5 billion on peak days. The platform has around 3,000 onboarded institutions, with about 500 active daily, and accounts for roughly 35% of Deribit’s activity on a typical day.
The reliance on centralized exchanges like FTX for settlement was a major constraint. The solution was Paradex, a decentralized exchange for spot, futures, and options.
Anand argued that the goal is to capture the wave of users migrating from centralized exchanges in the wake of the FTX collapse. He claimed that Paradex already shows tighter liquidity than Binance on large orders and offers the key benefits of user privacy and self-custody.
Anand highlighted Paradex’s flagship innovation: “perpetual options.” These are novel derivatives that trade like perpetual futures but have the downside protection of an option, protecting users from price-based liquidations. He believes this simplified, more user-friendly approach to options is a key to onboarding new users.
