November 16, 2025

Why High Frequency Traders Are Leaving Wall Street

1 hour 14 minutes

Annanay Kapila, CEO & Founder of QFEX, joins us to talk about his journey from high-frequency trading at Flow Traders and Tower to building a revolutionary exchange platform. We discuss how crypto market structure solves traditional finance inefficiencies, his Y Combinator experience, regulatory strategy, 100X leverage mechanics, prediction markets, and why sports betting actually works. Launching December 2025.

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Notes:

• Tower did half of all major exchange volume

• QFEX raised funding through Y Combinator

• YC takes 7% equity for $125K investment

• Bitcoin trades at 100X leverage on exchanges

• S&P futures limited to 10X leverage

• QFEX waitlist hit 10,000 people

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

00:03 Annanay Kapila

02:08 Y Combinator

05:23 Market inefficiencies

09:03 Designing QFEX

12:50 Hyperliquid & Perps

18:30 Zero fees vs UX

22:36 Sharp flow & fees

27:12 Intermediating market makers

34:26 Misaligned incentives

40:53 Perps use cases

45:52 Perps vs Options

49:33 Market fragmentation

58:47 Kalshi vs Polymarket

1:06:23 KYC

1:10:37 Are prediction markets useful?

1:13:02 Wrap

The Gwart Show is sponsored by Ellipsis Labs. Backed by Paradigm, Electric Capital and Haun Ventures. The founders, Eugene and Jerry, have experienced Citadel Jane Street in the Solana Core team since launching their order book DEX, Phoenix. They’ve done over $80 billion in trading volume by making onchain order books competitive with centralized exchanges.

Ellipsis is hiring for New York-based engineers. Work with a small focus team who are results driven, collaborative, and use a modern stack. If you’re an engineer who wants to work on infrastructure that’s already proven itself in the market, go to ⁠⁠ellipsislabs.xyz⁠⁠.

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