CEO.

The studio had reached the point where the perp DEX needed an operator rather than a project lead. Liquidity work was under way, the matching engine was past first deploy, and the next eighteen months were product, fundraise, and go-to-market — all moving at once. The CEO would own the protocol entity end-to-end and sit on the studio's group operating cadence. The board wanted someone who had built and shipped a derivatives venue, not someone who had advised one.

Constraints were tight on three axes. Compensation had to read as a founder package — meaningful protocol economics, modest cash — without losing operators who had already taken a generational outcome. Geography was flexible but the core of the team sat across two European hubs and one Asian one, so the CEO needed to run a distributed group without ceremony. The non-negotiable was sector pedigree: the brief explicitly excluded TradFi-first leaders who had never traded a perp.

The senior bench for perpetuals has consolidated around a small number of venues, and the operators who actually shipped order-book or vAMM matching at scale are well known to themselves. Most have already taken founding equity at a competing protocol or moved into infrastructure. Below that tier sits a wider group of strong product and engineering leads who have run a vertical inside a perp DEX without ever owning the full surface — capable, but not yet a CEO.

Our read was that the search would not be solved by widening the brief; it would be solved by being patient at the top of the bench and disciplined about who genuinely sat above the line. We anchored conversations around founders who had run a venue through a full market cycle, including the deleveraging events that test risk parameters and the governance fights that test resolve. The studio supported a slower opening week in exchange for a tighter close.

The shortlist drew from operators who had owned a derivatives venue front-to-back, plus a small number of senior leads from adjacent infrastructure who had the right product taste and a credible path to CEO. Every conversation was opened by Peter directly. No outbound from researchers; nothing on the open market.

• Founders who had taken a perp DEX through a full liquidity build.
• Senior protocol leaders from order-book venues stepping up to the seat.
• Operators who had run derivatives product at a tier-one centralised exchange and were ready to move on-chain.
• A small set of TradFi crossover candidates with on-chain execution history.

The hire was a founder who had run a perp DEX through a complete liquidity build and a market deleveraging event, then exited the seat cleanly. What made them right was less the venue history than the way they read risk parameters as a product decision rather than a governance one. They presented to the studio board with a six-month plan that re-sequenced the launch around what the protocol could actually defend in adverse conditions, and the board converged inside a single meeting.

The close was deliberate. Compensation was reworked twice to find an alignment between protocol economics and personal liquidity. The candidate's own counsel ran the documentation. We held the studio to the structure agreed in week one rather than letting it drift under deal pressure, and the offer signed on the fourteenth week from kick-off.

“The lesson here was about discipline at the top of the bench. The temptation in a market this consolidated is to broaden the brief once the obvious names decline; the better move is to slow the opening and re-engage the right people on the right terms. Spectrum's read on the venue history, and on which operators had actually owned the parameter set rather than inherited it, made the difference. Patience in the first month bought the close in the last.”

— Peter Wood