In the past two years, the landscape of the Perp DEX space has been rapidly evolving—from the early focus on security and basic features to the current competition in matching speed, liquidity depth, capital efficiency, and higher-level user experience and strategy tools. The competition in this space is increasingly resembling a war for 'high-performance financial infrastructure', where winners must not only lead in performance but also occupy a position in product narrative and user perception.
Various data from Hyperliquid continue to suppress centralized trading platforms, with cryptocurrency prices repeatedly hitting new highs. Perp DEX has become one of the most profitable and fiercely competitive sectors in the crypto industry.
Pacifica was born in such a context.
Pacifica Product Introduction
Pacifica is a perpetual contract DEX based on Solana, founded by three founders including former FTX COO Constance Wang in January 2025. It launched its testnet in just two months and completed its mainnet launch on June 10. Two months after launch, the platform's trading activity surged rapidly, with daily trading volume exceeding $50 million by August 13, and the number of active users surpassing 1,000, showing very strong growth momentum.
Their goal is to create a platform that combines top trading performance, user-centric product design, and AI-driven smart trading tools, allowing anyone to easily execute complex trading strategies.
In terms of performance, Pacifica leverages Solana's high throughput capability, having certain advantages in execution latency and order processing speed. Additionally, it integrates AI-assisted trading strategy generation and risk management to lower the barriers for strategy formulation.
Currently, due to being in the early stages of product development, Pacifica's mainnet only supports trading of three perpetual assets (BTC, ETH, SOL), with more currencies to be listed in the future.
The fee tier of Pacifica is entirely determined by trading volume, updated daily based on the account's trading volume over the past 14 days. All sub-accounts share the same fee tier as the main account. The trading volume of sub-accounts is included in the total for the main account's fee calculation.
Since this is a Perp dex built on the Solana chain, a Solana-compatible DeFi wallet (such as Phantom, Solflare, Backpack, Ledger, etc.) and USDC collateral are required before trading.
For security reasons, as the scale of the closed testing expands, Pacifica currently limits the maximum deposit amount to $5,000. Any deposits exceeding this amount will be restricted at the front end, and API deposits over this amount will be held as pending.
Team and financing background
According to the official website, the core members of Pacifica come from top trading platforms in the crypto space such as Binance, FTX, Coinbase, NFTperp, top financial institutions like Jane Street, Fidelity, and AI pioneers OpenAI, DeepMind, ByteDance, with academic backgrounds from MIT, Stanford, National University of Singapore, and other leading institutions.
Pacifica's founder, Constance Wang, was the COO of FTX & co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, and has also served as the head of business development at Huobi, with experience in risk control at Credit Suisse Private Banking. She has rich experience in global trading platform operations, risk management, and business development.
Another co-founder, Jose (@The0xJose), previously founded NFTperp and successfully completed a $3 million financing led by 1kx, familiar with the entire process of building a high-performance decentralized trading platform from scratch. At Pacifica, he focuses on optimizing the stability, efficiency, and scalability of the trading system, and also plays a role in Pacifica's product narrative and user experience design.
There is also a core team member Tony (@AsyncBlock), about whom not much information is available, suspected to be mainly responsible for Pacifica's technical development work.
In terms of financing background, Pacifica has maintained zero external financing to date, clearly stating on its website 'We haven't raised external capital', with funds entirely raised by the founding team, leading to a more independent and controllable development pace.
Currently, Pacifica is trying gamified marketing activities to build community interaction highlights and increase trading volume. The founder Constance Wang's background at FTX has also sparked much discussion. Within the broader Solana DEX community, users have discussed the development threshold and ease of building, noting that the current development environment is becoming increasingly mature, implying expectations for high-performance DEX—this is a favorable background for Pacifica.
Moving forward, competition within the Perp DEX space will only become more intense: the Solana ecosystem is amplifying its advantages in fundamental performance and liquidity, while AI-driven trading tools will accelerate the decrease of entry barriers for ordinary users into complex strategies. For Pacifica, both opportunities and challenges coexist.
In this race where liquidity and speed are equally important, the market will ultimately reward those players who can both 'run fast' and 'tell a good story'. Whether Pacifica can grow from a 'potential stock' to a 'top player', we will take it step by step.
