🚨 RiseX AMA Recap 🚨
I interviewed
@sam_battenally , founder of
@risextrade, during our Space for the Spanish-speaking community.
Here’s a full breakdown of the most important takeaways, covering Sam’s background, RISEx’s funding, XLP, RWAs, Spot, and upcoming community incentives.
Quick summary ➝ Spot is coming to testnet soon, RWAs will remain a priority, and new competitions and incentives are coming for regional communities.
1⃣ Who is Sam?
- Sam’s background is in engineering and trading. He entered crypto in 2017 through HFT, taking advantage of the inefficiencies and arbitrage opportunities that existed across exchanges.
- His edge didn't come from predicting the market but optimizing order and price latency and identifying quirks in exchange matching engines.
- He later co-founded RoboVault, a DeFi protocol that reached $50M in TVL and generated more than $2M in profits for its user but he decided to shut down the project.
- Sam believed markets would move onchain, so he focused on building the infrastructure needed to make it possible and founded RiseX.
2⃣ Onboarding new users
- Users don’t need to understand the underlying infrastructure or even what “onchain” means. They just need a great product that delivers clear benefits.
- RISEx want to bring EVM order books to a level that can compete with CEX but retaining everything in DeFi.
This could allow users to:
- Use ETH, LSTs, LP positions, vault shares, and other safely priced assets as collateral.
- Use perpetual positions as collateral and borrow against them.
- Access structured products, multi-leg trades, and basis positions with one click.
3⃣ Regionals communities
- RISEx is working with regional partners to provide exclusive benefits to its communities.
- There will be additional incentives to trade on RISEx for the regional communities.
-The team also wants the community to understand what makes its infrastructure unique and what it can offer compared with other exchanges.
- Interesting things are coming for our community. 👀
4⃣ Funding
RISEx has raised a total of $ 7.5M
-> A $3.5M seed round led by Finality Capital.
-> A $4M bridge round with Galaxy.
RISEx has angel investors connected to Nansen, CoinGecko, Aave,
@VitalikButerin and other major companies and protocols.
- The team has been relatively conservative when raising capital, so it still has the flexibility to pursue another round if needed.
- However, there are currently no concrete plans to raise additional funding.
5⃣ Bittex as an advisor
- According to Sam, very few people understand crypto markets and order book microstructure at the level of
@BittexXBT
- His contribution goes far beyond tightening spreads or increasing market depth.
He also works with RISEx on areas such as:
- Order replacement rates.
- Order book stability and uptime.
- How liquidity widens during periods of volatility.
- Bittex also shares the team’s conviction in the advantages of perp DEXs over CEXs, which is why he joined RISEx as an advisor.
6⃣ XLP Vault and market making
- Most exchanges hire private market makers to provide liquidity, but RISEx sees 3 major problems with this model.
1- It is expensive and often requires large upfront payments or token allocations.
2- Incentives are not always aligned. The exchange wants the best possible liquidity for its users, while the MM wants to maximize profits and minimize its own risk.
3- The MM’s profits leave the platform.
- So RISEx decided to use XLP Vault to participate directly in market making while building a platform that can attract external market makers organically.
-This gives RISEx better control over liquidity quality, while the Vault’s positions, exposure, and performance remain transparent onchain.
7⃣ XLP benefits and risks
- For traders, this model aims to provide higher-quality liquidity and retain more of the value generated within the RISEx ecosystem.
- For liquidity providers, XLP provides access to market-making returns that would normally be reserved for specialized firms.
- Sam considers a yield of around 20% highly competitive in a market where lending through Aave offers roughly 3.5%.
⚠️ However, this yield is neither risk-free nor guaranteed.
- The Vault takes market exposure, so users need to understand how it works and the risks involved before depositing capital.
8⃣ RWAs vs crypto assets
RISEx currently offers: 17 crypto assets and 8 RWAs.
- There is no fixed ratio for future listings, but Sam expects RISEx to add more RWAs than crypto assets over the coming months.
- RISEx is seeing stronger demand and significant trading volumes across these markets.
- However, the team will continue monitoring crypto and listing promising assets that generate real user demand, as it recently did with DRAM and MU.
- RWAs will remain a priority, but RISEx will not disappoint its crypto-native audience.
9⃣ OG Traders and new roles
- There are currently 25 OG Traders, but new users will soon have opportunities to earn the OG role and unlock its exclusive benefits.
🔟 Spot on RISEx
- Sam is particularly bullish on Spot. RISEx uses EVM and shares state and execution with the rest of DeFi on the network, opening the door to deeply liquid spot markets integrated with other protocols.
Spot and composability can unlock:
- Greater capital efficiency.
- Deeper liquidity.
- New ways to use assets as collateral.
- More advanced structured products.
In fact, this opportunity was one of the main reasons Sam started building RISE. He didn't commit to a definitive launch date, but he confirmed that:
The smart contracts are complete, the UI is finished and the team is integrating the remaining components.
Spot is coming to testnet soon. 👀
👉THE TAKEAWAY
➡️ RISEx has raised $7.5M and retains the flexibility to raise again, although no new round is currently planned.
➡️RWAs will remain a priority over the coming months because of growing demand and strong trading volumes.
➡️XLP aims to improve liquidity, align incentives, and give LPs access to market-making returns.
➡️New competitions and incentives are coming for traders and the regionals communities.
➡️Spot contracts and interface design are complete, with the testnet launch coming soon.
If you want to join RiseX here's my link:
rise.trade/invite/carrenft
Bullish.