Serum (SRM)

Designing markets requires adversarial thinking, economic intuition, systems knowledge, and taste. The first three are table stakes.

As an engineer, taste is the visceral discomfort you feel when a system has hidden fragility, even if it "works”. You sense something is broken before you can articulate why, and then you spiral until you can.

This is the only way I know how to build things, and it's shaped by experience.

Serum's matching engine had an event queue that split matching and settlement into two separate transactions. The first time I read the code, I knew something was off: the design introduced an asynchronous bottleneck in the hot path. Every maker fill had to wait for a third-party transaction before funds became available. Phoenix V1 eliminated this by settling both sides of all trades atomically.

In 2022, every indexer on Solana relied on program logs for state reconstruction. The problem was that program logs could get truncated, and any system built on them could never have full data inte