Bankless · Monday, July 27, 2026
Vlad Novikovski discussed the evolution from his previous company, Lunch Club, to Lighter, explaining that crypto ideas were always in the background. The pivot was driven by a belief that existing crypto trading methods didn't leverage the underlying decentralized rails effectively. He identified a significant market opportunity in building secure, verifiable, and composable decentralized exchanges.
“Because we even like in 2017, when we settled on Lunch Club as ideal, like we were thinking about crypto ideas then too. Like, I think when we had a short list of like five ideas, like two weren't crypto.”
“So the idea was like, okay, but this stuff is all random. People just happen to meet, like, there's all this data on the internet. Now we use this data to shop. We use it to listen to music, to find recommendations for movies, for content to read. Why not use it as a way to, like, do really valuable things? networking, right? Making the right connections.”
“So for the most part, like, that was less than 1% of the volume of how digital assets were traded. They were actually traded in ways that didn't actually use the rails that they were for. And so that was like, okay, like, how do we solve that problem?”