Orbs – DeFi’s Next Big Users Are Banks and Bots

Ran came to crypto the way many lawyers of his generation did. In 2015 a university friend and future Orbs co-founder, Daniel Peled, told him he had raised money for his startup in Bitcoin. Within two years Ran was the rare attorney at a reputable firm who understood the technology, and he spent the 2017 ICO boom advising clients who wanted to do things by the book when no book existed yet. Nine years into Orbs, he explains plainly what the project is: a proof-of-stake network with no TVL or DEXs of its own, which supplies the automation and logic that smart contracts can’t perform by themselves. That makes Orbs nearly invisible to the traders who use it. Ran is candid that this is good for users and difficult for a project whose token benefits from retail recognition. He also acknowledges that the market has moved enough that a small pivot is needed for Orbs to stay relevant.

His view of the current market is sober. The yield chasing of DeFi summer has mostly gone. Many retail traders left after the October 10, 2025 liquidation cascade and did not return. The activity that remains is increasingly professional, ranging from two-person trading teams running bots to BlackRock buying spot assets for its ETFs, which is why Ran prefers the term “on-chain finance.” He calls Hyperliquid the most successful dApp to date. He also argues that most DEXs, even ones that dominate their ecosystems, cannot build Hyperliquid-level order book depth. Orbs’ answer is Perpetual Hub Ultra 2.0, an intent-based model in which hedgers take the other side of trades and offset them across Binance, Hyperliquid, Lighter, Variational, Aster and other venues. Users get pairs from all of those markets on whatever chain they’re on, with a single collateral. QuickSwap has already made it the default perps engine across its chains.

Ran says he rarely opens Google or Gmail anymore. He runs most of his online life through a Telegram bot on OpenClaw, with Anthropic and OpenAI models working in loops. That habit led Orbs to repackage its products as an MCP and an agent skill, and to think seriously about how a protocol gets discovered when an AI agent, rather than a person, chooses which tools to use. He says the Orbs swap skill now outranks bigger, better-funded projects on adoption, while noting that actual agentic trading volume is still smaller than the hype suggests. He also covers the recently passed OIP-9 DAO vote, upcoming Season 1 tokenomics built on revenue-funded buybacks and burns, and record staking levels despite a token he openly says is underpriced. In the hot take round, Ran calls himself 80 percent Bitcoin maximalist. He predicts that within ten years banks will provide liquidity and trade through AMMs instead of OTC desks, and says most people still underestimate what today’s AI tools can do.

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