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Marginfi co-founder Edgar Pavlovsky Leave Suddenly from the Solana DeFi project in April.
The split was not entirely amicable. “I do not agree with the way things have been done internally or externally,” Pavlovsky said books On X at that time.
Now, eight months later, Pavlovsky is a core shareholder in Paladin, a Solana client that aims to protect validators from so-called sandwich attacks while helping them “earn more pooled rewards.”
Around the same time, Temporal, a cryptocurrency research shop with several members associated with the Marginfi system, began advertising “Nozomi,” a special fast client intended in part to prevent sandwich attacks.
Temporal is legally different from mrgn and marginfi. Temporal said most of its employees have never worked at Hamshvi.
One temporary researcher I spoke to was critical of the project his former colleague was working on. The two products are not the same, according to both parties' accounts, but they focus on the same area. There is one notable difference, though – the Pavlovsky Paladin has a token, while the Hamshvi, controversially, has yet to feature a native currency.
Temporal's Nozomi infrastructure is designed to process transactions as quickly as possible. It also prevents sandwich attacks by only sending transactions to “whitelisted” Solana validators who are known not to attack users. The project promotes this as a way to democratize trade.
“We have a lot of experience from our commercial arm to get the best execution of what we want to do,” said Jacob Bovsek, developer at Temporal. Temporal is “attaining this level of development for basically anyone.”
Paladin, on the other hand, is a fork of the Jito-Solana client that identifies and drops sandwich attacks from transaction packets and helps Solana validators prioritize transactions with high-priority fees attached, Pavlovsky told me. Paladin's verification tools will eventually be accessible via the yet-to-be-launched PAL portal Token.
I asked Pavlovsky if building a product with similar anti-sandwich goals to his former colleagues at Temporal makes him want to compete more aggressively.
“No, man, they’re like my kids,” Pavlovsky said with a laugh. “I'm excited for them to win, and I'm rooting for them to build.” Blockchain infrastructure builders tend to have too much of a winner-take-all mentality, he said, when multiple companies can succeed at the same time.
Povsic showed less friendliness. “I applaud them for going after the sandwich because it's a big deal, but their approach is naive and (very selfish) from what we see,” he said of Paladin. Povsic added that Paladin is "arbitrarily" blocking some transactions based on a broad network of criteria, and advanced players will still be able to withdraw sandwiches. “Introducing her own code into the equation made things worse for Bovsic.”
Pavlovsky responded to the criticism by saying that the anti-sandwich whitelist is "clearly systematic rather than arbitrary."
“(P)aladin is designed with high-end gamers in mind (and is exhaustively tested against sandwiches on the entire network). (We are) always happy to discuss trade-offs,” Pavlovsky said in a text message.
“(We) believe Paladin is extractive and would rather focus on open source initiatives than send a percentage of priority fees to Bloxroute, which owns 20% of the token supply,” said Ben Coverstone, co-founder of Temporal and co-founder of the research. mrgn, “Nozomi is very different in that it is just a product to help with real estate transactions quickly.”
The PAL code is an interesting part of the equation. Marginfi often draws criticism for its so-called points program that tracks user contribution to the platform. Points are frequently used to allocate token drops, but MarginFi is one of the main Solana DeFi protocols that does not issue a token. Pavlovsky never mentioned the lack of fringe code in his April 2024 departure letter.
I asked him if frustration with the platform not launching a token contributed to his departure. “(I'm) a pro icon and I think the right time to ship one is (4th quarter) of 2023,” Pavlovsky said in response.
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