Joseph DeLong, the former CTO of SushiSwap who now runs stablecoin card startup Colossus, said he will launch a decentralized exchange called Deepstate on Robinhood Chain next week.
“I have a side project for a decentralized exchange that goes beyond nights and weekends. I’m launching it next week on the @robinhood chain,” DeLong wrote on X on July 24, linking to a whitepaper published on GitHub.
Complete on-chain order book
A June 29 white paper authored by DeLong specifies a limit order book that resides entirely within smart contract storage. Each remaining order is packed into a single 32-byte word: price tick, quantity, rounding correction code, and time-first nonce, and stored in a binary radix tree keyed by price and arriving orders. This design provides 4.3 billion logarithmically spaced price ticks, limits the work each trade performs at a fixed 64-bit depth in the tree, and is an attempt to limit gas costs regardless of the number of orders on the book.
Fully on-chain central limit order books are still rare on EVM chains, as all storage reads and writes have a gas cost. While most order book exchanges match trades off-chain and settle them on-chain, automated market makers avoid matching altogether. DeLong’s paper attributes the core structure to Warp, a matching engine design presented at EthCC in 2023 by Plasma co-authors Joseph Poon and Christopher Jeffrey.
DeLong, who served as SushiSwap’s CTO until he resigned in December 2021, later argued in a post-mortem of Sushi-era ETHDenver that DAOs need a hierarchy. He went on to found NFT lending protocol Astaria and held a senior director role at Kraken. He currently serves as CEO of Colossus. Colossus is a startup building a stablecoin credit card network designed to bypass Visa and Mastercard.
Robinhood Chain DEX Race
The deep state will also join the crowded field. Robinhood launched the Arbitrum-based chain’s public mainnet on July 1st, went live from day one with Uniswap, 1inch, Arcus, and permanent partner Lighter, and the network has grown rapidly. On July 21st, it overtook Base in daily active users, registering 323,969 addresses compared to 274,520 for Base in its first three weeks. Leiter has since made Robinhood stock tokens eligible as collateral for the company’s PERP market.
DeLong did not reveal a launch date beyond “next week,” nor did he disclose trading pairs, fees, or the name of the token.
