Aster CEO Leonard: Replicate 80% of CEX products within a year, aiming to surpass Binance.

"In the encryption circle, a year is too long. If you had asked me this question two weeks ago, I might have given you a completely different answer," said Aster CEO Leonard in a recent interview. This entrepreneur, who comes from a traditional investment bank background, is now at the helm of the highly regarded Decentralization trading platform Aster.

Aster is seen by the outside world as a Perp DEX of the Binance ecosystem, but Leonard provided a new definition: "We are no longer a traditional perp DEX."

His goal is even more ambitious: to replicate 80% of the product experience on CEX within a year, and hopes to one day surpass Binance—their biggest investor.

01 From Traditional Finance to Web3: Leonard's Entrepreneurial Journey

Leonard's career began in a technical position at an investment bank in Hong Kong, focusing on the construction of high-frequency trading systems and risk engines. This experience gave him a deep understanding of the operational mechanisms and limitations of traditional financial markets.

Around 2015 and 2016, he started his first venture, getting involved in an Asian B-end financial technology loan platform. However, at that time, there was immense regulatory pressure, coupled with chaos in the industry, leading to the eventual failure of the project.

After his first entrepreneurial setback, Leonard began searching for better solutions and came into contact with blockchain in 2016.

He recalled, "I was initially attracted by the ICO, invested in a few projects, made some money on the first one, thought I was a genius, but ended up losing everything on the next few projects."

It was these early experiences that sparked his strong interest in blockchain technology itself.

In 2019, he joined the DeFi project Injective Finance, and then inspired by dYdX, he began to conceive the possibility of building a trading platform on-chain, which ultimately led to the prototype of Aster.

02 Beyond Perp DEX: Aster's New Positioning and Vision

Although starting with perpetual contracts, Leonard emphasized that Aster has evolved into a multi-chain integrated trading platform.

"In everyone's impression, Aster is a project of the Binance ecosystem, because we started from BNB Chain at the beginning," he explained. "But we are no longer just BNB Chain; we also support Arbitrum, OP, Linea, and Solana, and we will connect more chains in the future."

In the past two weeks, it is Aster's spot trading product that has attracted a large number of new users, as users can only trade on-chain order books to purchase Aster tokens.

At the same time, Aster is also one of the largest yield asset providers on the BNB Chain, with products like USDS and aUSDT, allowing users to earn yields while using these assets as collateral for trading.

Leonard clearly pointed out Aster's competitive direction: "Our real competitors are not other DEXs, but CEXs themselves. What we want to do is an on-chain version of Binance."

03 Dark Pool Design: Balancing Privacy and Transparency in On-Chain Experiments

Aster launched the "dark pool" design on the first day of the product launch, allowing users to trade orders with hidden directions and quantities. This design is inspired by traditional finance.

Leonard shared his insights: "In the TradFi world, the volume of dark pools and OTC far exceeds that of the public trading market."

He believes that there is also potential demand for "privacy preferences" in on-chain financial transactions.

However, the design of dark pools has also brought about a conflict between transparency and privacy. Leonard admitted that there is currently no method for "public verification" of the fairness of hidden orders.

"If anyone has a good solution, we welcome cooperation," he said. "We also have some ideas, but we haven't fully thought them through yet."

Regarding the future of dark pools, Leonard believes that success mainly depends on the entry of institutions, but the current anonymous, non-KYC status is a barrier for most institutions.

He speculates that the Prop Trading high-frequency fund may start testing the waters in 1-2 years.

04 Token Economy and Points Program: Pursuing a Balance of Fairness and Efficiency

In response to external doubts about the Token "96% concentrated in a few addresses", Leonard made a clarification:

• At least 80% of the tokens are on-chain verifiable and transparent locked state, of which 50% is used for airdrops.
• The largest wallet address is actually the asset contract address, used for users to conduct spot trading.
• Yzi Labs is the only private investor, investing in equity rather than the Token itself, receiving a small share of the Token with no intention to cash out.

Aster is conducting the second phase of its points program, distributing a total of 4% of the total supply, with the goal of fairly and evenly distributing it to loyal users who genuinely participate in trading and long-term holders.

After the announcement of the plan, Aster's daily trading volume once exceeded other Perp DEXs, becoming the number one in trading volume.

To avoid a massive sell-off caused by the immediate release of 4% of the rewards, the project team will maintain a flexible release schedule, but the specific amount obtained by users will be made public and transparent immediately after the end of the second quarter.

05 Honest Review: XPL Incident and Oracle Challenges

In an exclusive interview, Leonard candidly reviewed the incident of the XPL perpetual index pricing configuration error that led to a price surge.

He analyzed the root of the problem: "The biggest mistake is that XPL is stuck in 'pre-market mode', and pricing can only rely on the internal matching book rather than the public market price, which leads to internal allocation errors resulting in incorrect pricing."

After the incident, Aster immediately switched back to the regular perpetual mode and fully compensated the affected users.

Leonard also shared the future improvement direction: even for pre-market perpetuals, external pre-market market oracle prices will be introduced as a reference.

Regarding the trading of tokenized stocks, he pointed out the current technical limitations: due to the constraints of oracles such as Pyth, Aster is temporarily unable to provide 24/7 tokenized stock trading services.

06 Aster Chain: Infrastructure Focused on Verifiability

Leonard revealed in an interview the positioning of Aster Chain - it is not just another "universal L1", but an infrastructure focused on "transaction credit aggregation and verifiability".

"We hope to aggregate all transaction credits on the chain, allowing everyone to verify these transactions," he elaborated on his vision.

This pragmatic strategy runs through Leonard's planning for Aster Chain: in the short term, it will focus on providing a good trading environment and user experience.

Building a complete ecosystem is a long-term direction, but he bluntly stated that "there are already enough chains now" and that efforts should not be dispersed.

07 Buyback Strategy and User Experience: The Path of Pragmatism

Regarding the market's concern about the repurchase issue, Leonard holds a pragmatic attitude and opposes rigid and predictable fixed mechanisms.

"Aster will allocate a certain percentage of its revenue for buybacks, but will not commit to a fixed timetable or ratio, in order to retain the autonomy for optimal allocation based on revenue and project phase."

He believes that in the early stages of the project, using funds to invest in the team and partnerships to drive growth is more valuable than using 100% for buybacks.

In terms of user experience, Aster has launched a grid trading feature that not only helps non-professional traders run strategies but also allows them to become liquidity providers through limit order trading.

With the completion of the TGE (Token Generation Event), the user composition of Aster has also changed: before the TGE, users mainly came from Asia, and after the TGE, there is a noticeable increase in interest from the Western world.

Future Outlook

Aster's goal is not to become another dYdX or GMX, but to create a complete and composable DEX product matrix. Leonard and his team are reconstructing the trading experience of CEX on-chain step by step with a pragmatic strategy.

"Five years from now, I hope the entire DEX industry will surpass CEX, and we will be the leaders among them." This entrepreneur, who comes from traditional finance, is steadily leading Aster towards this goal.