The Citadel Alum Reshaping The World Of Trading

Summary

Vlad Novakovski, founder and CEO of Lighter, discusses his journey from math Olympiads to being recruited by Ken Griffin at Citadel at 18, the early Madoff Ponzi call in 2004, and why he left Wall Street for Silicon Valley. He details how Lighter pivoted from Lunch Club while retaining 80% of engineers, its custom ZK circuits that slash finance compute costs by 99%, its partnership with Robinhood, upcoming on-chain options in Q3, and the token-centric value accrual model where all growth flows to the token instead of equity.

• Vlad was a math prodigy who competed in Physics and Informatics Olympiads alongside future founders of Anthropic and Facebook's first CTO.
• Ken Griffin personally closed Vlad at 18 to join Citadel and in 2004 dismissed Madoff as a Ponzi scheme, five years before its collapse.
• Vlad left traditional finance for Silicon Valley, working at Quora and building AI startups before returning to build Lighter.
• Lighter's engineering team stayed through the pivot due to shared technical passion, internal incubator process, and trust in leadership.
• Custom zero-knowledge circuits let Lighter run finance at 1% of the compute cost of general-purpose chains.
• The Robinhood partnership was driven by Lighter's Ethereum security, low latency, and forward-deployed engineering collaboration.
• On-chain options are planned for Q3 2026, with Robinhood as a distribution partner.
• Lighter abandoned equity fundraising after its pre-token round; all value now accrues to the token, aligning the entire cap table.