Aevo

Aevo operates as a high-performance decentralized derivatives exchange, a strategic evolution from its predecessor, Ribbon Finance. The platform was co-founded by Julian Koh and Ken Chan. Koh, who serves as CEO, dropped out of Cornell University's computer science program to immerse himself in the cryptocurrency space. His journey included roles as a software engineer at Coinbase and consultant at Metastable Capital, providing him with deep technical and market insights before co-founding Ribbon Finance in 2020. Chan, the CTO, brings eight years of experience in the crypto industry, including development roles at Coinbase and Zilliqa.

The transition from Ribbon Finance to Aevo in 2023 marked a significant strategic pivot, aiming to expand beyond structured products into a full-fledged derivatives platform. This rebranding involved merging Ribbon's offerings into Aevo's suite and establishing a new governance token, $AEVO, to which $RBN holders could migrate. Aevo is designed for sophisticated traders, offering a unified platform for trading options, perpetual futures (perps), and other yield strategies from a single margin account. A key differentiator is its offering of Pre-Launch Token Futures, which allows speculation on tokens before their official exchange listings.

Aevo’s technical architecture is a hybrid model that combines an off-chain order book for high-speed trade matching with on-chain settlement for security and transparency. The platform is built on the Aevo L2, a custom Layer-2 rollup based on the OP Stack, which enables it to process over 5,000 transactions per second with low latency while inheriting Ethereum's security. This infrastructure is designed to provide a trading experience comparable to centralized exchanges (CEX) but within a decentralized framework. Revenue is generated through trading fees, where takers pay a 0.05% fee and makers are charged 0.03%. The platform serves a market of both individual and institutional traders looking for advanced, high-performance tools for hedging and speculation in the DeFi space.

Keywords: decentralized derivatives, perpetual futures, crypto options, Aevo L2, off-chain orderbook, on-chain settlement, Ribbon Finance, Julian Koh, Ken Chan, perpetual contracts, high-performance trading, crypto derivatives exchange, DeFi, OP Stack, layer-2 rollup, pre-launch futures, structured products, yield strategies, aeUSD, decentralized governance, crypto trading, blockchain finance, financial engineering, tokenized derivatives, margin trading