After the Market Meltdown, Yonatan Sompolinsky Says: “Crypto Won’t Evolve Until We Fix How Transactions Are Ordered.”
Following one of the most violent crashes in recent crypto history — a cascade of liquidations that wiped billions across exchanges — Kaspa founder Yonatan Sompolinsky has thrown down a challenge to the entire industry.
His message is clear: we’ve been fighting the wrong battles.
The real problem isn’t block size, fees, or even TPS — it’s transaction ordering.
The Missing Piece: A Programmable On-Chain Scheduler
Sompolinsky argues that crypto needs a universal, programmable transaction scheduler — a system that allows users to pre-commit conditional actions directly on-chain before market events unfold.
No more reliance on off-chain bots, centralized servers, or traders staying awake through the night to react manually.
This scheduler would act as a coordination layer, allowing markets to respond automatically and fairly under stress — removing latency advantages and turning reactions into code baked into the protocol itself.
The Concept of the “Ghost Swan”
Sompolinsky introduces a new term: the ghost swan — a class of market crashes that are avoidable, caused not by true unknown risks but by toxic sequencing of transactions.
In a ghost swan, some participants lose simply because their transactions were processed milliseconds later than others — not due to bad fundamentals, but due to bad ordering.
He suggests that last weekend’s market crash was precisely that:
“A ghost swan — violent, chaotic, but not fundamentally justified. A failure of ordering, not of economics.”
Why the Scheduler Matters
A fair, programmable scheduler could fundamentally change how markets behave:
- Allow users to pre-program their reactions to market conditions.
- Expose hidden leverage and systemic fragility before it erupts.
- Build fairness into the protocol layer itself, rather than relying on private bot networks.
Such an approach could turn decentralized finance into a system that is proactive, not reactive — one capable of self-stabilizing under stress.
The Call to Builders
Sompolinsky isn’t celebrating the market chaos; he’s using it as a rallying cry.
He is calling on:
- Rust developers
- MEV researchers ready to operate ethically
- Builders who believe crypto should fix finance, not just reinvent it
Because if his vision is right, the next major evolution in crypto won’t come from faster blocks or lower fees — it will come from how we order transactions.
