alphaKΞY is the founder of Poolshark Labs, the company behind Poolshark. With a background in computer science and coding, alphaKΞY has worked in various development roles before founding his own company. His real name and identity remain unknown.^[1]

Education

alphaKΞY attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2010 to 2013, before moving on to the University of Illinois Chicago to complete his Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science between 2013 and 2015.^[2]

Career

alphakΞY worked as a Java Development Intern at Bosch Software Innovations in 2015, where he streamlined the deployment process by developing continuous integration tools via Selenium for front-end testing and verified software quality through integration and regression testing. He moved on to become an Associate Software Engineer for Capital One in May 2016, lasting up to February 2018. There, he worked mostly with Python, developing a framework to parse transaction messages with different layouts. He worked for Discover Financial Services in Chicago for three years from April 2018 to June 2022 as a DevOps Engineer, authoring Terraform modules to automate platforms and building AWS Lambda functions to scale to improve data analytics. Right before he delved into Poolshark, alphaKΞY worked shortly at Prime Protocol as a Smart Contract Developer between March 2022 and September 2022.^[2]

He founded Poolshark Labs in 2021, finally launching Poolshark in the last quarter of 2023.^[3]

Variant

alphaKΞY was part of the first batch of fellows in the Variant Founder Fellowship, an accelerator program. He was one of the 24 teams to have been accepted for mentorship and investment.^[4]

Kernel Block 7

alphaKΞY is also a fellow of the Kernel Block's 7th cohort.^[5] Kernel Block is a participatory environment where peers can learn from each other.

Poolshark

alphaKΞY wanted to solve the problem of impermanent losses from providing liquidity on a decentralized exchange. He came up with the Poolshark platform idea to solve it.

Poolshark was born out of some discussions I had with various options protocols about how they could sustainably source liquidity to trade options tokens, which always have the risk of going to zero. Having a bidirectional liquidity position means taking risks on both sides. If the pool is OPTION and ETH, then you take the risk of price divergence in either direction. What if you could just sell OPTION into ETH and have any ETH you receive along the way not recycled back into the liquidity pool? This is where directional liquidity was born. It was on the plane coming back from Devcon in Bogota that I realized this could be used to buy and hold ETH to recapture profits LPs miss out on versus normal holding.
- alphaKΞY^[6]

The Poolshark DEX is a collection of non-upgradeable smart contracts that together create a platform that facilitates trading of ERC-20 assets on Ethereum and other blockchains. Its noncustodial smart contracts act as a decentralized exchange offering both directional and bidirectional liquidity. Each type of position is placed within a liquidity pool and transacted via swapping. Having multiple LP types allows Poolshark to function as a hybrid of an automated market maker (AMM) and a limit order book (LOB) at once. The key difference between Poolshark and limit order books is that LOBs have an order queue while Poolshark merges all liquidity into a single pool, allowing for higher transactions. FIN is the native token of Poolshark rewards users for providing liquidity, utilizing the platform, and DAO governance.^[7]