Decentralised Exchanges Are Becoming the New Financial Centres: How Paradex Is Building Zero-Fee On-Chain Markets

In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Anand Gomes to discuss why decentralised exchanges are becoming the new systemically important financial centres, how Paradex can offer zero fees without breaking, and what it really takes, mentally and structurally, to build the rails of a new on-chain economy.

Built Different: The Reality Behind “Eating Glass”

Anand is very clear: running a crypto exchange is not glamorous. When Paradex processed $5.4 billion in 24 hours on Black Friday without an outage, what people did not see was the team on calls through the night, watching for every possible failure.

That level of stress only makes sense if you feel called to build something much bigger than yourself. As Anand puts it, his “personal calling… outweighs anything else”, and as long as that mission is bigger than the pain, each crisis becomes “another bump in the road”. Founders live on the line between delusion and conviction, and the only real test is whether the market eventually agrees that what you built matters.

From Paradigm to Paradex: Taking Control of Settlement

Anand’s first platform, Paradigm, is now the core infrastructure for crypto options. It connects large institutions and accounts for a significant share of volume on Deribit, the leading options exchange. However, Paradigm still relied on centralised exchanges for settlement, and their priorities often hindered product innovation.

If you want to build a hundred-billion-dollar business, you cannot be held back by someone else’s roadmap. That realisation led to Paradex: a decentralised perpetuals exchange built on a Starknet-based rollup that settles to Ethereum. Instead of layering crypto onto web2 banking rails, Paradex is designed natively for an on-chain world, where execution and settlement live inside the same programmable environment.

Zero Fees and a New Market Design

One of Paradex’s boldest choices is zero trading fees for users. Anand thinks what Robinhood did in traditional finance – attracting retail by cutting visible fees and monetising elsewhere – is inevitable in crypto. Retail flow is incredibly valuable, and the venue that wins it wins liquidity.

Paradex flips the standard exchange model. Instead of charging takers and paying makers rebates, Paradex charges makers a small fee and keeps taker fees at zero. In theory, that would push makers to widen spreads, making pricing worse. Instead, the counterweight is a new order type called Retail Price Improvement (RPI). RPI gives makers a protected lane where they can quote tight prices to retail without getting picked off by other pros. Because they can safely earn P&L there, they can afford to pay Paradex while keeping spreads sharp. Anand’s principle is simple: create new value for one side of the market, then charge based on that value instead of taxing everyone at the door.

From Software to Smart Contracts: The Economy Moves On-chain

Anand frames crypto as the next logical step in the history of software. At first, software automated tasks like calculations. Then it took over full functions such as accounting. Later, entire businesses moved online, like e-commerce.

With smart contracts, software can now host entire economies. Rules, money, messaging, and ownership can all live inside a shared, programmable environment.

That is where Ethereum comes in. Anand calls it the “chosen one” not out of chain loyalty, but because it combines security, property-like guarantees, and credible neutrality in a way that resembles the legal and enforcement environment around old-world financial centres.

If the physical economy increasingly connects to this digital “world computer”, the places that coordinate capital, risk, and ownership on-chain will become the new New Yorks and Londons.

DEXs as the New Financial Centres

In traditional finance, functions are fragmented: banks lend, brokers find counterparties, clearing houses settle trades, custodians hold assets, and exchanges match orders. Wall Street is just where they all cluster.

On-chain, software collapses these boundaries. A decentralised exchange like Paradex can act as an exchange, clearing house, money market, and asset management platform, all wired together as composable primitives in a single system. From one account, users can trade, borrow, lend, and, over time, access more complex products without hopping between siloed pools and intermediaries.

Anand thinks people still underestimate what that means: “We’re not playing for billions anymore. The TAM of these businesses is in the trillions.”

In his view, leading DEXs such as Paradex and Jupiter are not casinos pretending to be markets; they are the early versions of the financial centres that will power the internet’s own economy.

Incumbents, Stablecoins, and the Cost of Legacy Rails

Anand does not predict the death of Wall Street. Big banks have massive distribution and political influence, and they are already reacting. For example, by exploring shared stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure. The lesson from the digital banking era is clear: those who ignore new infra risk becoming irrelevant.

However, there is a structural difference between building natively on-chain and layering web3 onto web2. The latter always comes with bridges, extra costs, and older systems designed for a different era. Capital markets tend to reward the lowest-friction, most efficient venues. That is where Paradex and other native on-chain platforms have an advantage: they can design from first principles instead of dragging decades of traditional assumptions with them.

Speculation, Democracy, and Ownership

Anand’s most interesting argument is philosophical. One of his professors described capital markets as the “economic equivalent of democracy”, and Anand still relies on that framing. Placing an order is like casting a vote, but with money at stake. That is why he sees speculation, including short selling, as necessary rather than shameful. Without critics, there is no honest price discovery, and without speculation, there is no way for markets to converge on a fair value.

Coupled with tokens, this produces what he calls an ownership economy. People who used to belong only to the labour class can join the ownership class with a single purchase. You no longer need to be an insider to own a piece of the infrastructure or network you believe in. In that sense, decentralised exchanges become the venues where people vote with their money on which assets, protocols, and ideas should exist.

Why Paradex, and Why It Feels Inevitable

When asked for one takeaway, Anand is blunt: decentralised derivatives exchanges are inevitable as systemically important financial centres for the new world. Anyone with a mobile wallet now has access to opportunities that used to sit behind layers of middlemen. That has never been true before.

It is also why we chose to partner with Paradex. Beyond throughput and architecture, Anand and his team operate on a simple rule: “Do what you say and say what you do.” In an industry full of noise and broken promises, Paradex combines hard engineering with a genuine obsession for quality.

If the new Wall Street is going to live on-chain, you want the people building it to both know what they are doing and care deeply about getting it right.

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