Pacifica (Decentralized Exchange)

Pacifica was founded in January 2025 by three founders, one of whom is Constance Wang. Wang recalled that she only started forming the team at the beginning of 2025, when the perpetual futures decentralized exchange (perp DEX) market already looked crowded, with at least one new platform launching every month, and many people told her she was too late. She believed that existing platforms often optimized for metrics that looked good in dashboards while ignoring what traders actually cared about, and that some bought code, rebranded it, launched fast, and never iterated, so she set out to build a platform where every feature came from listening to users and where “fast” was an obsession.⁠[1][2][2][2][2][2][2]

After barely two months of development, Pacifica launched a Closed Alpha on March 29, 2025 and invited friends to test it. Wang described the product at the time as “rough”; testers reported bugs, requested features, and argued about what a good perpetual exchange should feel like. Many of them stayed, which she attributed to the team turning feedback into features faster than they expected.⁠[2][2][2][2]

On April 24, 2025, the blockchain security firm BlockSec released version 1.0 of its audit report on Pacifica Fi’s perpetual futures smart contracts. The audited contracts were written in Rust using the Anchor framework and functioned similarly to a hot wallet, handling user deposits and withdrawals based on logs and backend logic. The issues listed in the report included a potential denial-of-service risk in the batch withdrawal function and a lack of a minimum value check in the deposit function, and its notes flagged potential centralization risk and a potential risk of front-running during contract initialization.⁠[3][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

On June 10, 2025, Pacifica entered a Closed Beta with real money, marking its mainnet launch; according to Wang, 70 traders generated $6 million in volume in the first 72 hours. Pacifica says it launched in June 2025 as a high-performance decentralized trading platform combining institutional-grade execution with self-custody and permissionless access.⁠[1][2][2][5]

From July to September 2025, Pacifica’s daily volume grew from $10 million to $25 million, and the platform added more markets and ran trading competitions. The engineering team pushed API latency under 10 milliseconds and opened API access to everyone from day one with no waitlists; the team shipped new features almost every week, including a “flip” function for reversing positions delivered within 48 hours of a request on Discord, as well as hotkeys, a turbo mode, a mobile web app, an affiliate program, and a market maker program.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

Pacifica’s points program launched at 00:00 UTC on Thursday, September 4, 2025, with snapshots taken every Thursday thereafter and 10 million points distributed weekly among eligible users. Points can only be earned through organic trading and other activities; self-trading, sybil, and other manipulative activities do not earn points, points cannot be purchased, and the formula is opaque by design and updated weekly.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6]

After the points program launched, daily volume reached $1 billion and then $1.9 billion, and the community grew to 20,000 users. Wang also noticed that some users traded only for points, and concluded that growth does not mean product-market fit and that the team’s real job was to convert those users into ones who stay for the platform itself.⁠[2][2][2][2]

On October 2, 2025, Pacifica’s 24-hour trading volume reached $1.75 billion, ranking first on the daily volume leaderboard for perp DEXs on the Solana network, with 15,325 total users and 8,954 weekly active users. Wang posted that a community member had arrived at the café where the team works that morning with a homemade cake to celebrate Pacifica passing $1 billion in daily trading volume.⁠[1][1]

On October 10, 2025, crypto markets crashed hard, with cascading liquidations and spiking volume. Wang said she watched the order book the entire day and that nothing broke; at the time she described Pacifica as four months old with a team of about 10.⁠[2][2][2][2]

After the crash, Pacifica completed engine sharding to raise order-processing throughput and rebuilt its fund security with multi-signature governance and hot-cold separation. Under the design, the hot wallet is managed by the matching engine, holds only a fraction of total funds, and can process withdrawals instantly up to a programmatic spending limit; the bulk of user funds sits in a cold vault secured by a multi-signature smart contract governed by a decentralized council distributed across multiple continents, whose sole function is to replenish the hot wallet within the spending limits. Pacifica partnered with Squads Protocol, a multi-signature infrastructure provider on SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry, for this purpose.⁠[2][2][7][7][7][7][7]

In the same period, Pacifica responded to trader requests by launching top-of-book (TOB) orders that reprice automatically, scale orders that can be set by dragging a price range on the chart, funding rate charts, liquidation heatmaps, and order book depth charts, as well as cross-chain deposits, pre-market trading, and stock and commodity perpetuals that trade 24/7.⁠[2][2][2][2]

In a review written on the last day of 2025, Wang said that in 11 months Pacifica had gone from being told it was “too late” to something people actually use; the platform was then running a 50% fee reduction through January 8. Her plans for 2026 included unified trading accounts, multi-collateral margin, vaults, a mobile app, and Pacifica’s own L1 blockchain, with the goal of becoming a complete onchain financial system.⁠[2][2][2][2]

As of October 2026, Pacifica supports perpetual futures and spot trading quoted in USDC, with more than thirty-five perpetual markets listed, leverage on perpetuals of 3x to 50x depending on the market, and margin modes consisting of cross margin unified with spot collateral and isolated margin. The platform prohibits trading by individuals or entities residing in, incorporated in, or operating from restricted jurisdictions including the United States, Cuba, Crimea, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, and North Korea, and programmatically restricts access from IP addresses in those jurisdictions.⁠[8][8][8][8][8]

Beyond its core exchange, Pacifica launched Print, a yield-bearing order product: users set a target price and direction and lock a deposit, the order earns a payout for each 24-hour cycle it waits (with 7-day and 30-day cycles also available on BTC), it is checked only at the end of each cycle to see whether the target was reached, and an unfilled order rolls into the next cycle; Print supports BTC, ETH, SOL, HYPE, and ZEC. Another product, Swim, is a live price prediction game in which users tap zones on a price-time grid that moves with the market and are paid at the locked multiplier if the price enters a zone. The website also features Neptune, an AI trading workspace for automating research, building workflows, and executing strategies; native iOS and Android apps are marked as coming soon.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][10][10][11][11]

In mid-October 2026, Pacifica’s trading volume over the previous month was $10 billion (DefiLlama data). Its fees are divided into eight tiers based on 30-day rolling volume, from a maker fee of 0.015% and a taker fee of 0.040% at the lowest tier to a maker fee of 0 and a taker fee of 0.028% at the top VIP 3 tier.⁠[12][13][13][13]

Pacifica says its team has experience in traditional finance, crypto, high-frequency trading, and AI, with backgrounds spanning Binance, FTX, Coinbase, Jane Street, OpenAI, DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry, and MIT, and that it has been entirely self-funded since inception. Pacifica summarizes its mission as democratizing trading intelligence, arguing that the next breakthrough in onchain finance will come not just from providing access to markets but from sharing the capabilities to thrive in them.⁠[5][5][5][5]

Pacifica: Official website: https://www.pacifica.fi/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

Pacifica Documentation: Official website: https://docs.pacifica.fi/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

X: Public account: https://x.com/pacifica_fi (opens in a new window)⁠[14]