Armaan Kalsi is the co-founder and CEO of Genius Trading, a privacy-first, high-speed onchain trading terminal for professional crypto traders. He is also a co-founder of Shuttle Labs, a New York-based software studio building non-custodial, cross-chain infrastructure.
A Yale-educated builder, Kalsi is focused on fixing DeFi’s “transparency bug” by providing sophisticated traders with private, execution-optimised access to spot, perp, and copy trading across leading networks, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Base, Avalanche, and Sui.
We caught up with Armaan Kalsi, co-founder and CEO of Genius Trading, at Consensus in Hong Kong last week to discuss the flaws in current trading terminals and his vision for an on-chain venue that rivals the performance of centralised exchanges.
Read more about why Kalsi believes the future of trading is multi-chain and how Genius intends to capture 90% of BNB Chain volume in the interview below.
You started building Genius while still at Yale. What problem were you personally trying to solve at the time, before Genius became a trading terminal?
This was in 2022. At the time, the Layer 2 thesis was still very large, and we were building a company called Lore. It was block data made legible. Our idea was that everything that can be an L2 would be an L2.
Back in 2022, we founded a company called Lore based on the “Layer 2 thesis.” We believed that eventually, everything capable of being an L2 would become one.
We knew this explosion of chains would create an overabundance of data that would be useless unless it was legible. Before ChatGPT, we were training transformer models to structure block data so users could ask questions in plain English, similar to how Dune AI works today.
However, we soon realised that data legibility and block explorers were becoming commoditised. After spending time across different ecosystems, it became clear that the true value lay in financialization and trading rather than analytics alone.
Before Genius, the project began as a block data and legibility tool. What did working that close to onchain data teach you about how traders actually behave?
It depends on the chain. Honestly, it taught us that many on-chain metrics are “fugazi.” If an unknown network claims 500,000 daily transactions, it is almost certainly programmatic noise rather than real human activity.
It also highlighted how fluid speculative energy is. In the early days, Solana’s dominance in the meme coin race was not a foregone conclusion. We saw massive runners on Avalanche and Base as well.
That observation cemented our belief in a multi-chain future. While single-chain terminals have a temporary edge right now, we are building for a world where users need to efficiently aggregate liquidity and opportunities across every ecosystem.
Not a wallet, nor an exchange, nor a bridge, what is Genius?
Our strategy is to land, expand, and verticalise. We intend to capture every surface of the crypto economy. On-chain activity boils down to a few core actions: swapping, staking, yielding, lending, trading memecoins, or using prediction markets.
We consolidate all these actions into a single interface. Once we dominate the interface layer, the next step is vertical integration. For instance, we saw $10 billion in spot volume flow through Genius recently.
While capturing fees at the interface layer is valuable, the real opportunity lies in building the exchange infrastructure underneath. We are effectively an interface today that will internalise its own liquidity tomorrow.
Genius feels like it’s built very deliberately for a specific type of user. Who did you have in mind from day one?
Day one and day ten represent different archetypes. Right now, we are meeting people where they are. To be honest, the terminal currently looks similar to other memecoin and speculative terminals because that is where the market is.
The question is how that will evolve over the next few years to become a venue for serious execution. We started with the prosumer who has capital to deploy and earn fees, but is not necessarily institutional.
We have seen many people get absurdly rich in crypto over the last ten years, yet they still maintain a non-institutional mentality and avoid custody. Genius is currently a speculative venue for them, with a plan to become a serious execution venue later.
You’ve said that if Binance were rebuilt today, it wouldn’t be a CEX. What does Genius intentionally borrow from CEX design, and what does it reject outright?
We reject the custody of funds outright. Holding user assets is not part of our business model. However, centralised exchanges excel in two key areas: user experience and market structure. Genius borrows heavily from both.
From a UX perspective, we offer a familiar flow. You log in with an email, use 2FA, and never have to manage a private key unless you choose to export it. It remains permissionless and non-custodial.
Regarding market structure, we look to the prop AMMs on Solana. They dominate the flow because market makers run proprietary strategies off-chain but quote the best prices on-chain. We aim to replicate that efficient market structure for EVM chains.
How do you think about the balance between speed and price quality when designing execution paths, especially across volatile or early markets?
It depends on the user’s risk tolerance. Given how our UI is set up, if I want to pay a very high-priority fee to enter and exit a highly volatile position in BNB or ETH, I can do so.
It is not up to us. We give users the ability to land wherever they want, in terms of speed. It depends on how much they are willing to pay and how much they value execution speed for their trades.
Genius’ privacy layer avoids offchain systems and zero-knowledge proofs in favour of onchain execution. What trade-offs did you make to get there?
We are not shielding transactions at the point of execution. We are shielding the mechanism by which wallets are funded. If you have 5% of a token’s supply and want to manage it across a hundred wallets, we help you coordinate that management.
We give you the ability to fund X number of wallets through a simplified UI or SDK. We obfuscate the funding step. Once the money is in those wallets, we do not shield the transactions.
There is no need to encrypt those transactions. It is optimised for one-to-many transactions, making it harder to track split positions compared to one-to-one funding. It is not a mixer and is very compliant.
You’ve described the current moment as “terminal wars.” What do most trading terminals misunderstand about professional users?
There are two types of professional users. There are those who spend time sitting at a terminal finding opportunities, and then there are the sophisticated users. For the sophisticated users, it is a question of priorities.
They want to move size without causing a massive price impact or being hunted. Seeing a wallet with 8% of the supply move creates panic. At the point where you are sophisticated enough to move size, you want the tools we have built to integrate that.
If you are just punting all day, other terminals work fine. But we are building for the long-term user who cares about execution quality and privacy.
Aggregators and intent-based systems have improved routing, but you’ve argued the front end is still broken. What’s wrong with today’s DeFi UX?
Fragmentation is the issue. We use aggregators and intents for almost everything. If you swap on Genius, you go through Jupiter on Solana or Odos on other chains. Everyone has a meta-aggregator at this point.
The question is, where do all the intents live? Do they live in a wallet or a dApp? They should live in one place that feels like a central home, not a centralised one. That is the UX gap we are filling.
Genius processed over $60m in volume with a relatively quiet launch. What surprised you most about who adopted the product early?
What surprised us was the demand for a tool that sits between the simple swap interface and the complex institutional terminal. We saw adoption among users sophisticated enough to care about execution yet still want the ease of use of a consumer product.
It validated our thesis that there is a large middle ground of prosumers underserved by current offerings. They want the power of a terminal with the simplicity of a swap.
YZi Labs made a multi-8-figure investment, and CZ joined as an advisor. What does that validation mean to you personally as a founder?
It is great. I think CZ is the GOAT among crypto founders. He is pragmatic and has repeatedly said that onchain trading needs to evolve and that the market it serves could be bigger than CeFi.
He puts his money where his mouth is. His words are not empty at all. Massive respect to them for trusting us. We can only repay their trust with execution, and that is what we intend to do.
When you imagine a professional trader using Genius daily, what’s the one workflow you think will feel fundamentally different from today?
A year from now, I would love to see someone participate in a launch on Genius for a new token managed by the protocol, and then watch that token be listed on a centralised exchange.
The flow we imagine is less about being early to a shitcoin listed on a CEX with massive risk, and more about Genius becoming the venue for a TGE where most of the upside is captured onchain. Everyone on the CEX would be late. That is the flow I want to see.
Zooming out: in five years, what does “winning” look like for Genius, and what does it look like for you as a builder?
I define winning by market share. I want to capture 90% of all volume on BNB Chain. Genius should be the absolute first stop for anyone entering the on-chain world.
The user experience must be seamless. When a user asks, “Should I use a centralised exchange or Genius?”, the technical differences should be invisible to them.
If someone can use Genius in five years without realising it is non-custodial, or that we aggregate liquidity from across the ecosystem, then we have succeeded. That invisibility is the vision.