Insights From Building Solana’s First Meta Decentralized Exchange Aggregator, with Chris Chung @ Titan

[00:00:00] Hello everybody and welcome to the Crypto Hipster Podcast. This is your host, Jamil Hasan, the Crypto Hipster, where I interview founders, entrepreneurs, executives, thought leaders, and amazing people all over the world of crypto and blockchain. And today I have an amazing guest. His name is Chris Chung. He is the founder, co-founder and CEO of Titan. Chris, welcome to the show.

[00:00:28] Oh, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. You're very welcome. So let's kick things off and ask you first, you know, what is your background and is it a logical background for what you're doing now? Yeah, sure thing. So I guess my background is in, I guess, U.S. equities. I worked for a fund previously. So there I was really in charge of doing low latency analytics.

[00:00:51] So you can imagine like grabbing all this data from Bloomberg, S&P, processing all that data to do thousands of valuation models for like companies across 20, 30 years worth of data in under a second and doing that all across the entire universe of U.S. equities. So, yeah. So that eventually did lead to me getting into crypto around 2018, 2019, because I was just looking for more and more, I guess, low latency data.

[00:01:16] So tick level data. And we really didn't want to pay NYSE or NASDAQ lots of money for their low latency data. So crypto data, especially from the exchanges back then, they were free, they were freely available. And we started exploring with them. And then we just fell in love with the crypto industry, pivoted the fund towards doing crypto. And there we started building out a bunch of applications that didn't exist back then. So back office solutions, trading systems, custodial management solutions.

[00:01:42] So we got that all set up. But then I guess earlier in 2024, we saw an opportunity in Solana, especially in the DEX aggregation space with one of my former co-workers. And we just thought it would be a great opportunity to start and start developing a competing product and trying to introduce some competition within the ecosystem. Did you just say 20 or 30 years worth of data in under a second?

[00:02:06] Yep. For each stock. So you can think like I'm crunching out thousands of valuation models every single day over 30 years of all the historical data that would have been existed at that point in time. Wow. OK. It sounds like you have a good background. So let's get into Titan then. What is Titan all about and what makes it great? Yeah. So as Titan is all about just providing the best possible price to its users without the user having to, you know, open up multiple tabs.

[00:02:37] So Titan is a Solana DEX aggregator, but it's also a meta aggregator. So what a DEX aggregator is, for those of you who don't know, is that we just go out throughout the entire on-chain liquidity on Solana and we find the best route for you to trade from one token to another. So if your trades USDC to Solana, for example, we would check every single DEX for you. We would start splitting your, I guess, trade through different DEXs and just provide you the path that we find that gives you the most Solana for the amount of USDC that you put in.

[00:03:04] Now, the twist that we add on to our platform is that we also do meta aggregation with a couple of new DEX aggregators coming into play. In addition to Jupiter, users don't want to go spread out their search through a bunch of DEX aggregators. That's why you have a DEX aggregator in the first place. So you don't have to look at all the DEXs. So we basically aggregate the aggregators and you route the user to the best price no matter what with no extra fees attached.

[00:03:33] I guess, yeah. So I guess the other thing that's unique on Titan is its own propriety routing algorithm there. Titan's algorithm really does outperform from our testing around 80% of the time. So that really does give us pretty high confidence that our algorithm plus the meta aggregation solution will always give users a reason to use Titan as compared to any other platform out there right now.

[00:03:58] So I'm going to ask you something from a reputational perspective. Okay. Solana is well known to be the home of the gambling token or the meme coin token, right? Not many people know the benefits of using Solana for decentralized finance, right? What are the benefits and how to improve trading on Solana? Yeah.

[00:04:25] So I think with the whole meme coin phrase, you've been seeing that Solana's infrastructure has been upgrading to keep track and keep processing like tens of thousands of new token launches every single day, handle like insane amounts of liquidity. So I think the infrastructure really is there to start really supporting the next level of financial infrastructure on top of blockchain. And I really believe that's where Solana is coming from. Like with the Trump and millennia token launch last week, you saw that the blockchain functioned admirably, even though some applications did go down.

[00:04:55] That's more on the ecosystem side of things and applications rather than the blockchain itself. With this, you know, with the lots of developments because of these meme coin phrases, because of the casino that you mentioned, I think the infrastructure and applications are just more ready for more, you know, prime time, more, I guess, institutionalized type of water flow that we can really handle lots and thousands, thousands of number of tokens being integrated, being launched every single day with that significant trade volume coming through.

[00:05:23] Everything does start off with, if it's a new technology looking like the wild, wild west, right? And then it's a matter of time before professionalism modernization comes in to really like spring that in. And we can see that already pumped off fund is where everybody launches tokens. But some of these AI agents have been using pumped off fund as a way to raise liquidity and funds for themselves. So it's actually pretty interesting how that's been evolving.

[00:05:48] Yeah, I think, you know, I think about the volume that you had and the time you had. You know, incorporate, you know, look at those transactions. And then something surprised me. I didn't realize the breadth of it. But the CEO of Coinbase came out and said he has there's a there's a million new coins. Is it a week or a month? Like, how are you going to be able to and how can you do it?

[00:06:14] How are we be able to keep up with that level of volume that gets created all the time? Yeah, so I think the blockchain itself can already handle it. But what I think everybody is looking forward to is the fire dance upgrade that will be coming. So I think the latest testing that they demoed out was I could handle a million transactions per second. And that is a crazy, insane amount, especially on a distributed system.

[00:06:36] I really think that, you know, once once we can keep upgrading the applications to handle the amount of order flow coming in, Solana will be easily able to handle all these millions of transactions that, you know, even Coinbase has difficulty keeping track of. Yeah, I think so, too. That'd be interesting. So so you leverage how you do this. How do you leverage complete on chain liquidity through your algorithm?

[00:07:04] And why does your algo outperform all of your competitors? Yeah, so basically how our data structure works is that we connect into every single one of the DEXs that we partner with. And we start getting quotes from them in order to pop their database. Now, the algorithm that we have takes a completely unique approach than anything else in the ecosystem. Most algorithms deployed today on Solana use standard pathfinding algorithms.

[00:07:32] So these are very classical algorithms that are taught to software engineers, but they're not the best choice for operating crypto markets. Best choice is actually doing like pure mathematical optimization. So you take a look at, you know, our competitors routes. Usually they like chunk their routes in 10% amounts. So, for example, if we were trading like $100 worth, they'll be splitting their routes in $10 chunks. So they might send $40 through one route, $60 through another route.

[00:08:00] Our algorithm will actually go to machine level precision and a smart contract itself will actually start splitting routes on the sense level. So just from there, you get some outperformance just from being able to cut up your routes in far lower quantities than our competitors. Interesting. So how does that, how does, I want to, I'm interested to find out how that works. How do you, how are you able to splice it down at lowest level where no one else can?

[00:08:52] Yeah. You need to see which one comes back. And then you're really constrained on that, both on the amount of pulls you can fit into the algorithm and the amount of time you have to actually process to find the optimal route there. Got it. So I'm looking at my crypto portfolio last night and I'm looking at the stock market prices and everything tanks. It's a Sunday night. Everything tanks on a Sunday night. I was like, well, I guess they didn't want the chiefs to beat the bills.

[00:09:18] But then I, then I woke up and I was like, okay, deep search got launched, which is this Chinese AI company platform. How do you see that making a difference? Yeah. Specifically within AI, right? Deep Seek. What's interesting about them is that it costs 10 times less to develop than any other model out there.

[00:09:44] I think it only costs 6 million while Facebook's latest model costs 60 million to develop. And based on the performance results, it's only a couple of weeks behind the top US models, even with all the US sanctions that have been put on China lately. So I really do think that, you know, it is opening up the world. China is focusing on different techniques in order to improve their AI rather than just focusing on the hardware, which the US AI companies seem to be doing. And it just seems to be reflecting with the results.

[00:10:13] Only slightly worse than the latest line models from like US companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic. But coming at a tenth of the price, it is a very, very new development that I think shocked everybody when it came out. And does that impact you at all, your algorithms or anything like that? Yeah. So I think with this development, you probably will see more of these AI coins start being launched, more of these AI agents, right?

[00:10:42] Because these models that are being released, they're fully open source from DeepSeq and a lot of other Chinese AI companies. That is a different alternative approach being taken versus the US or more Western-inized companies on there. So with more powerful AI engines that can power AI agents that are open source, I think we're just going to see an influx and even more interesting use cases be deployed on chain.

[00:11:07] Now, what they would be, I can't really say, I don't really know, just because you can't really predict anything in crypto. That's why I love the industry. Everything changes within three months. There could be completely new technology, completely new framework that nobody's ever thought of before. I agree. And one of those things that is kind of surprising to me is, you know, all along the whole entire time, I've heard of the strength of Ethereum, right?

[00:11:34] I mean, there was some arguments over the past couple of years between what's better, Solana and Ethereum. And people talked a couple of years ago about Ethereum possibly flipping Bitcoin. Now, there seems to be a lot of discord or lack thereof in arguments in the Ethereum ecosystem. So I want to find out what's going on and why is ETH ripe to be displaced as a smart contract layer?

[00:12:02] And how is now Solana positioned to do it? Yeah, I really think Ethereum has a crisis in terms of figuring out what they really want to be. Do they want to be like, you know, money or do they want to be a smart contract development platform for everybody? I think the Ethereum Foundation is kind of confused and they really haven't taken steps to further the advancements of Ethereum as a programming language.

[00:12:27] So Solana has really advanced over the past couple of years just because of its low latency and its low costs, which really appeal to users, especially within the financial trading space. Ethereum really hasn't made many developments or many strides in outlining the roadmap in order to lower costs, lower latency, which is extremely important. I think they have a really strong focus on decentralization, making it sure that everything can run on Raspberry Pis.

[00:12:53] But is that what really our end users in developing new financial infrastructure actually want? Because 12, 13 second block times, it's not something that modern financial infrastructure will tolerate, to be honest. Like market makers cannot post up quotes fast enough. Traders can't execute fast enough and price moves way faster on centralized exchanges.

[00:13:14] I really think that Solana, in terms of pushing the technical capabilities of distributed systems, is the one that will be capturing up all this order flow in the future. Interesting. You know, I got to tell you, I got an email from my father-in-law this weekend. It was confusing to me. He's like, what do you think are the best cryptos to invest in to trade?

[00:13:43] And I'm like, I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, if I invest in crypto, it's not going to be to trade, it's going to be to invest. And I don't want to buy something and then trade it away, right? So, you know, what, like, I don't even know how to begin to answer that. So, is Solana, you know, are these a better investment? Do you want to trade them for memes?

[00:14:07] What do you see as the sustainable approach to, you know, what you're doing and how can you help investors? Yeah. So, I guess what is extremely interesting from an investment perspective, in my opinion, are assets that you truly believe will grow in the long term and ignoring the short term volatility, especially if you have a long term timeline, right?

[00:14:33] So, what we really do to help is to provide that benefit of trading on chain versus, I guess, centralized exchanges. Centralized exchanges, you could get your Bitcoin, you can get your Solana. But on decentralized exchanges, you could find price improvements that don't exist on decentralized exchanges, as well as access to, I guess, more liquid staking tokens, be able to lend out your assets.

[00:14:55] So, what Titan really gives is the ability to swap into, like, for example, liquid staking tokens that can yield around 10% just by holding the underlying Solana token. And then you get an extra 10% yield all right on top of it. So, you get both the directional exposure as well as additional, like, I guess, you're already put in terms of traditional finance, like a dividend just for holding the asset itself. And we really make sure that you get the best possible prices for assets like these that only live on chain.

[00:15:25] Yeah, I'm thinking everybody back in 2022 was chasing yield, right? So, they put money into BlockFi, they put money into FTX, they put money into Celsius, and we know what happened. So, how is the yield situation improved nowadays? Yeah, so, those companies you just mentioned, they were all centralized entities that really cross-mingled their funds. It's a funny story on that.

[00:15:55] Like, the fund I was working at previously, like, put in some assets into BlockFi, but we quickly found out that they were co-mingled, and we immediately exited, and it, like, was in a week. And it was way before all the FTX, all the bankruptcies happened on there. So, it was pretty easy to spot from our perspective. But it also wasn't a surprise when they also went down during that whole catastrophe. Now, what's changed since then is that these yield lending platforms, they're no longer centralized. They're all decentralized on chain.

[00:16:24] You could see them. You could see their proof. They are very, very valid tested. And you could see that non-defines are being co-mingled, so you won't end up with a disaster like BlockFi again on that side. You could see that the assets have lots of collateral behind them, and that there is a strong and healthy, vibrant community that can support the yields that are being distributed. And then you could withdraw your funds at any time instead of waiting for one of these centralized entities, like, seven to ten business days to actually withdraw your funds for you.

[00:16:54] That all makes sense. It makes sense for you and me, right? How about these large institutions like Bloomberg, like my former AIG, like, you know, a JPMorgan or some, not even a bank, but, like, a large enterprise that moved very slowly. What's going to be the factor or factors that drive them to start using, or maybe they are already, the DeFi protocols?

[00:17:22] Yeah, I think it's just a matter of demand and if they can see that, you know, the platform has been very well valid tested. Because the yields you can earn on stablecoins on, let's say, Solana versus Ethereum versus traditional markets with just your normal U.S. dollars, there's a large divergence. I believe right now, stablecoins on Solana, you could probably earn anywhere between 9% to 13% on a yield. On Ethereum, it's probably 5% to 6%. And on money markets, it'll be 4%, 4.5%.

[00:17:50] I think that for these large institutions, they just have to wait, they just have to see that there's enough time going through, that their investors, the people that they report to, are comfortable operating on chain. And I think that also comes with more government, I guess, regulatory clarity on what they can do on chain. And then it's just a pursuit of yield because ultimately, these businesses, these institutions are profit maximizing businesses.

[00:18:15] And if they can stomach the risk, if they have regulatory clarity on what they can invest in, what operations they can take into account, the increased yield on DeFi on chain just makes sense to grab as part of your exposure. Yeah. Now that you mentioned regulatory, we have a couple of things that happened recently, right? Number one, the big thing that happened recently was we have a new president. Donald Trump is a new president.

[00:18:42] And he says he wants to create a US crypto basket, right? As a reserve basket, right? So what do you see? What do you foresee under the Trump presidency? And what do you think will be this basket of reserve? What do you think sort of make it? So I think with Trump, he is a big supporter of crypto.

[00:19:09] Like we mentioned before, he launches meme coins on Solana. He has talked about crypto, I guess, the crypto or the strategic Bitcoin reserve previously. And I do think that all of these things will eventually happen. You know, timelines are a bit hard to guess as to exactly when. But I think he is a very strong crypto believer. The biggest thing of the Trump administration for me is regulatory clarity in the US, which does really set the rules for a lot of entities abroad as well.

[00:19:37] So with additional clarity, we can expect to have more and more developers come into the ecosystem, more and more companies invest into the blockchain system. Which is why I think you see a lot of people estimating that there'll be a lot of more mergers and acquisitions, a lot more companies going public as the regulatory environment becomes more favorable.

[00:19:54] Now, in terms of, you know, a crypto reserve basket, in order for the US to really have a big stake in how this next generation of financial rails evolves, I think they'll probably be targeting all the coins that really support the underlying infrastructure, especially in finance. So you'll probably you'll definitely see Bitcoin, you'll probably see the tokens that support blockchains that do lots of transactions. So definitely ETH, Solana. And then you might get some that specialize in payments as well.

[00:20:22] I know like XRP, Ripple is another one that may also make the cut there. But really, I think the strategy behind there is to preserve the US dominance in payment transaction systems internationally, because that's basically what we have right now with the Swift ecosystem for transferring bank wires. Everybody really just has to go through this US led system. And I think that's what Trump really wants to make sure stays in place. That makes sense.

[00:20:51] I don't hear a lot of people saying that, but that makes a heck of a lot of sense to me. So the other the the the the other regulatory thing that I saw recently was an announcement by Hester Pierce, who's the now the guest that's going to be the chair of the SEC. Right. Or is already a chair, but she's going to think of a Gary spot, hopefully.

[00:21:18] She said bye bye SAB one to one, which was an accounting pronouncement that really limited banks abilities to be in the space and the custody assets. Right. What do you see with the banking coming on board and how's that going to affect DeFi?

[00:21:39] Yeah, I think there's a there's a couple of ways to go around this, like some more of these banks that are offering more DeFi centric products to their, I guess, wealth management clients that they would have. So we can potentially see like the wealth advisors letting their investors know that, you know, crypto is now on the table beyond those DTFs that they could start operating on chain and that there's sufficient safeguards. U.S. banks are probably the most innovative ones in the world.

[00:22:03] And like if they have a stake in crypto, we could probably see a lot more developments, a lot more investments inside the on chain infrastructure, especially when it comes to more of these more safer custodial solutions. And, you know, they will have to go to where the current liquidity lies instead of just building their own isolated blockchains there. So I really think that when these banks come online, they can operate in crypto more.

[00:22:27] You're just going to see an explosion, entire ecosystem around it, anywhere from companies that support like more institutional led products to users being just onboarded by these banks because it gives, I guess, higher returns for their clients, which means we get more clients in general. Right. So that will make them in general. That will be one factor that's helping DeFi become more attractive, right?

[00:22:53] Yield, improved regulatory environment, Trump presidency. What are the factors of making DeFi become a much more attractive investment now? Yeah, so I think it's just acceptance onto there. I think a lot of people will have negative impressions of DeFi on that side. But as more and more people figure out that these systems are fully ballot tested, that it's been, you know, vetted by the government, it's been looked at, and it seems to be extremely solid.

[00:23:23] It seems to the next generation. I think more and more people will start onboarding as they see the benefits, because instead of paying $20 for BankWire, you could just pay like a couple cents to transfer anywhere in the world. And I think that's very, very valuable. And that will allow DeFi to grow. You've already seen like access, DeFi products provide access to things that we wouldn't have been able to do before. Like I wouldn't have been able to lend my money out at like a 10% rate to anybody in the past.

[00:23:48] I would have only been able to just, you know, lend out to, let's say, a bank for a very low rate, maybe 50 basis points. But now DeFi consolidates so many things into one perpetual products, spot products, lending markets. It's just a big ecosystem that anybody can play with and really just democratizes the entire financial system for individuals like you and me to participate in very efficiently at the best market rates. Yeah.

[00:24:13] And it's going to be easier with like, if we're having a million tokens a month or a week or whatever, we're going to have lots of opportunities. Right. So if we have, say, by the end of the year, 100 million crypto tokens, that's good in a way that we expanded. What are the drawbacks and how do you see maybe some industries consolidate? How do you see consolidation occurring?

[00:24:40] What do you think needs to happen so it's just not, you know, a giant like catch all? Yeah, I think, you know, having a million tokens for people to go through. Having those million tokens in a way is both good and bad. I guess the good portion of that is that, you know, the infrastructure is there. I just support so many tokens. People can invest in what they want. New ideas can really flourish.

[00:25:07] The bad portion is like how do users really filter out for what is a genuine good token rather than, you know, some knockoffs on there. And I really think that comes down to the app layer. We just have to see like more apps, more project teams really launch features to really protect users, give them actually what they want instead of being fooled by various, I guess, you know, knockoff scams that may appear. It's up to the app, it's up to the certification process that they do and what they want to display to the user.

[00:25:34] Ultimately, I think it's going to be as a result of a company or a couple of projects finding out what users actually want, what they demand, and then just delivering on it. Whether that is, you know, something like what Coinbase is estimating is like a more certified method. Or if it's just taking a look at market statistics and trying to see, it's like there's been a lot of volume traded through from multiple users. This looks like an interesting token. We can push it out to the next phase.

[00:26:00] Kind of something like, you know, penny stocks versus blue chip stock listed on S&P. So I do foresee that's where like this will probably go in terms of categorizations of different tokens. Yeah. And Solana has the largest order book by far. Largest, largest volume by far, like the Dex is, especially this month, have been doing insane volumes. Even just that one day where Trump launched and then millennia launched, it was like the volumes have been gigantic. Yeah.

[00:26:30] It's a fascinating time we live in. So I want to find out a couple more things. One is your roadmap for Titan. You know, what's coming down the pipe in the near and medium term? And what do you see your vision as in the future? Yeah. So for our roadmap, we have our private beta launched right now. So we are planning to bring in more and more users on board to try and test it out.

[00:26:59] We just want to get the most honest, brutal feedback there as possible. But the entire point is to provide the best prices possible to the end user and then be able to provide a genuine benefit of using our platform versus any other platform. So performance gains that you wouldn't see anywhere else. After that, after we launch our swap product, we'll have an API product for, I guess, businesses or any type of systematic trader to use more efficiently as well.

[00:27:23] And then we'll be launching additional ways to make orders and trades such as like DCA limit orders so that we give users more options in order to execute their trades. Now, the important thing here is that we want to make sure that these trades are protected from MEV so that nobody is front running them. So we're going to be hiding the information as much as possible to make sure that our users are fully protected and get the best price that they actually fully deserve. Right. So that is our roadmap going forward.

[00:27:52] And like our ultimate vision is to become the home of Solana DeFi, where everybody's coming to our platform to do their swaps because we always provide the best price. Everybody else is integrated into our systems and from an algorithmic perspective. So that is the ultimate vision that we really want to go towards. Interesting. I had that. You brought it up. So I got to ask you. Now I have now have another question.

[00:28:17] Like, um, MEV, you know, that's, you know, people who made money on that Trump coin were the people who put the initial money in and then people who traded in the first two minutes. Right. How do you stop that MEV front run or people, you know, from front running other people who might have like insider knowledge? How do you, how do you do that? Yeah, I think it's just from an app design perspective, because if your transactions are fully out and open,

[00:28:46] you have high slippage tolerances, then people can really sandwich your trades and then like make sure that you get the least possible amount of value out of your trade as possible. So, you know, and so on, there's services such as Gito that will hide your transactions from others until it's posted on chain. And then from the application layer, we're also providing, you know, slippage estimates in order to make sure that from our, from our testing, from our, like, I guess, simulations, what, what reasonable estimate can we do on your slippage amount?

[00:29:16] So you don't set, you know, 5% slippage on like a standard stable coin pair. We want to set that to be as low as possible. So nobody can really just get in front of you from the reported price to really like drive, drive the price efficiencies down. Got it. I like it. It's a good idea. I like it. Very good. So I want to thank you very much for speaking with me today. I enjoyed our conversation. I have one last question. It's easy. How can people find more information about you?

[00:29:47] How can they become users of Titan? How can they become traders of user platform? How can they do that? Yeah. So if you go on our website, Titanindex.io, you can find more information there. Our documents are all on the website and then you can also join the wait list as well on that website as we let more and more people into the private beta. Awesome. Thank you very much for your time today. Thank you for having me.