From the Inside Out: What Eight Years of DeFi Business Development Taught Me About Building Infrastructure That Lasts

In July, 81.8% of QuickSwap’s token holders voted to move their perpetuals onto infrastructure we built. That vote took eight years.

That is eight years of sitting across from DEX teams, understanding what their traders needed, and figuring out why the infrastructure they had wasn’t always enough. The order types were too basic. The execution was leaky. Traders were getting picked off in ways the team hadn’t instrumented for, and the users who figured it out quietly went to a centralized exchange and didn’t come back.

For years, the question I kept hearing was: “But isn’t this what smart contracts are supposed to handle?”

That question used to frustrate me. It doesn’t anymore. Getting to the point where I understood why people asked it, and why the answer is more complicated than it sounds, is essentially the story of the last eight years.

1. Why smart contracts alone weren’t enough

Orbs was founded in 2017 in Tel Aviv. The original thesis was about enterprise blockchain, permissioned infrastructure, and compliance readiness, the kind of thing large institutions could adopt without their legal teams having a collective breakdown. That seemed like a reasonable bet at the time. It was also wrong, or at least pointed in the wrong direction.

But Orbs would go on to take a very different approach to blockchain infrastructure. In 2019, the project introduced what it described as the first Layer-3 blockchain, building an additional execution layer designed to extend the capabilities of existing Layer-1 and Layer-2 networks.

The important part isn’t the label. It’s the execution layer.

Think of a smart contract as a set of instructions that runs when a transaction happens. That’s powerful, but it has limits. It executes atomically, in a single block, and doesn’t natively maintain an ongoing process that can keep working in the background. That’s fine for a basic swap. It’s not enough if you want to run a TWAP, a time-weighted average price order that breaks a large trade into smaller pieces over an interval to minimize market impact. That order needs to persist across multiple blocks, execute conditionally, and respond to changing market conditions.

What Orbs built is a separate execution layer that sits between the L1/L2 chains and the application, using a network of permissionless validators to run the kind of persistent, stateful logic that smart contracts alone can’t. When you place a limit order or a TWAP on a DEX running Orbs infrastructure, the smart contract handles custody and settlement. The Orbs network handles execution.

I joined to help build and commercialize this. That was, in the beginning, harder than it sounds.

2. The eight-year education in what DeFi protocols actually want

My own path into the industry came from a legal and corporate background. Before joining Orbs, I spent several years at GKH, a leading Israeli law firm, working with technology companies, venture capital and private equity investors, and on transactions including M&A, technology licensing and financing. I also became deeply involved in the firm’s blockchain and cryptocurrency practice.

That experience gave me an unusual vantage point when I moved into Orbs’ business side. I had spent years looking at technology companies not just as products, but through the lens of how they were financed, structured, commercialized, and built into sustainable businesses. I brought that perspective with me as Orbs evolved.

Business development in early DeFi infrastructure is a specific kind of experience. You’re not selling something anyone has asked for. The protocols you’re talking to have built their own solutions, usually scrappy, usually fragile, almost always tightly coupled to their core contracts in ways that can cause problems later. They’re proud of what they built. They should be. And you’re showing up to tell them it’s not quite right.

My legal background turned out to be useful here. I was used to sitting across the table from founders, investors, and technology companies and understanding not just what they were building, but what they needed from a commercial relationship. In crypto, that meant learning to translate between highly technical teams, traders, liquidity providers, token holders, and the business realities of running a protocol.

The conversations that went well taught me something consistent: the DEX teams who moved fastest were the ones thinking about their users first. Not the technology, not the tokenomics, their users. When I could show that traders on competing venues had access to limit orders and TWAP strategies and theirs didn’t, the conversation changed. The gap became real.

QuickSwap was one of the first major integrations. It had been live on Polygon since 2020, one of DeFi’s most established trading venues, and was willing to look hard at what their traders were missing. We started with dTWAP and dLIMIT. That grew into Liquidity Hub, which aggregates liquidity across venues to improve execution prices. In Q4 of 2025, we built out a full perpetual futures platform on Base. Then in July 2026, QuickSwap put Perpetual Hub Ultra 2.0 to a community governance vote, a full shift of their decentralized perpetuals to Orbs infrastructure, and it passed with an overwhelming majority of QUICK token holders in favor.

That vote meant something beyond the partnership. A landslide community vote in DeFi governance, on a question of infrastructure, is not a rubber stamp. These are people who read the proposal, understood the tradeoffs, and decided. That kind of trust takes years to build, and you can’t manufacture it.

3. The gap nobody in DeFi likes to talk about

I want to be direct about something the industry tends to sidestep.

The gap between DeFi trading and centralized exchange trading is not primarily about liquidity. It’s about execution infrastructure. A professional trader on a centralized exchange has access to limit orders, stop-loss, take-profit, bracket orders, conditional execution, and advanced position management. A trader on most DEXs has a swap box and, if they’re lucky, a basic limit order that may or may not execute reliably.

This matters because the traders who generate the most volume, the ones who move markets, provide liquidity, and make the ecosystem function, are not going to use inferior tools indefinitely. They’ll use what works. If DeFi doesn’t close that gap, the users who migrate to CEX features for the trade don’t come back. Over time, that shapes what DeFi is capable of becoming.

Perpetual Hub Ultra 2.0 is our most direct answer to this. It runs a complete perps stack on Layer-3: execution, settlement, hedging, liquidation, and pricing, with TEE-secured execution, cryptographically signed price feeds, and state roots committed on-chain via rollup settlement. One-click trading, account abstraction, gasless transaction flows. The experience a professional trader expects, without surrendering self-custody.

The decentralized part is not a compromise. That’s the point. Custody stays with the user. The execution quality competes with centralized venues. Those two things are not supposed to coexist, and for years they didn’t. They do now.

4. Where this goes

DeFi’s next phase won’t be won on tokenomics or marketing. It’ll be won on execution, in both senses of the word. The protocols that build infrastructure are serious enough to compete with centralized finance on its own terms, while preserving what makes DeFi worth preserving: self-custody, transparency, permissionless access. That combination is hard to build and hard to replicate once it works.

Orbs has 1.12 billion ORBS staked in our Proof-of-Stake network. We have production integrations across QuickSwap, SpookySwap, THENA, and others. We have a team across Tel Aviv, London, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Lisbon, and Limassol who’ve been building since 2017.

The years I spent in business development, building on top of an earlier career spent advising technology companies, investors, and blockchain businesses, taught me what the market wants and where the friction actually is.

That’s what I’m bringing to the next stage.

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