Two years ago, the Solana-based derivatives decentralized exchange, 01 went on an indefinite hiatus until today when it announced that it will relaunch as N1.
According to a post from its co-founder Dima Romanov, the exchange will have the support of Arthur Hayes and some other VCs. Further into the post, Dima also revealed a walk down memory lane as he reminded readers of what happened to them in the first place.
Dima is optimistic about N1 relaunch
Dima’s long-form post on X began with him revealing how he, David Cao, and Sheheryar Parvaz set out to build the best derivatives platform on Solana. Their work led them to develop the derivates DEX, which they called 01 at the time.
“We believed in fully on-chain, high-performance trading. What we didn’t anticipate was how much the world—and this industry—would change,” he added.
Dima revealed that while Solana weathered through the dark days of frequent network outages, he and his colleagues kept their heads down, building. He also mentioned market collapses and crises that made them realize better uptime wasn’t enough.
“Decentralized execution, as it existed, couldn’t compete with centralized exchanges. If we were serious about bringing real finance on-chain—not just speculation, not just collectibles—we needed more than marginal improvements. We needed a fundamental shift. That’s why we started N1.”
When FTX imploded, the team lost their term sheet and funds overnight. However, Dima said they chose to forge ahead instead, building, and fortunately, their investors kept the faith.
“They believed in the vision, in us, in what we were creating,” Dima wrote. “There’s a narrative that VCs don’t matter. That they’re just dead weight. The truth? The wrong ones are. The right ones—like the ones we’ve chosen—are mission-critical.”
Dima also praised 01 users who kept trading through the chaos. “They never left,” he wrote. “We won’t forget that. More on that soon.”
N1 is relaunching to a more stable Solana network
According to Dima’s post, N1’s relaunch is backed by industry mainstays like Arthur Hayes. The derivatives DEX also returns to a broader and more stable Solana ecosystem.
On February 6, 2025, Solana officially celebrated going one whole year without any network-stalling consensus problems. The network has now processed over 369 billion transactions so far, and the Firedancer upgrade seems to have played a big role in that.
There is a lot of controversy around Solana thanks to the memecoin frenzy catalyzed by Pump.fun, which saw Solana’s decentralized exchanges (DEX) process hundreds of billions throughout 2024.
Volumes were so high, Pump.fun transactions accounted for more than half of all transactions during the final months of 2024. Even now, Solana’s 24-hour trading volumes nearly double that of ETH’s, even though it still has a long way to go before it rivals ETH’s $57.92 billion TVL.
Despite the blowback and blame passing from recent market crashes, Solana is still the second-largest DeFi network by TVL, with a current value of $9.34 billion. This growth is driven by innovations, increased adoption, and upgrades to the network infrastructure such as the Firedancer nodes, to improve network stability and performance.
