📊The Need for Carbon

Finance today is split across two disconnected systems.

On one side, crypto operates as a closed ecosystem. It’s fast, composable, and accessible — but liquidity is fragmented, markets are limited, and the capital base remains relatively small. Most trading happens within a tight circle of assets and platforms, and access to global financial instruments is almost nonexistent.

On the other side sits traditional finance (TradFi), where the real economy runs. The global derivatives market has a notional value above $600 trillion, with daily turnover exceeding $6.5 trillion in OTC derivatives alone. Within that, CFDs — used by retail and institutional traders to get exposure to stocks, commodities, indices, and forex — generate over $30 trillion in monthly volume.

Despite the rapid growth of crypto derivatives, especially with perps on CEXs and emerging DEXs, the entire on-chain market still represents only a small fraction of the broader global derivatives landscape.

Disconnected Liquidity and Market Access

These two ecosystems — crypto and TradFi — remain siloed.

• Crypto traders have no access to traditional markets like stocks, commodities, and forex.

• TradFi traders miss out on blockchain’s transparency, speed, and open access.

• Liquidity is confined to each silo, resulting in inefficiencies and shallow markets.

Efforts to bridge the gap have largely focused on tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs). But tokenizing stocks or commodities introduces real operational complexity:

• Custody and redemption requirements

• Legal and jurisdictional friction

• High operational costs

• A need to rebuild liquidity from scratch

It’s not the right abstraction layer.

The Right Abstraction: Derivatives

Blockchains are not built to move physical assets. They are built to exchange risk.

Derivatives are the most natural fit for on-chain markets because they allow traders to gain exposure to underlying assets without needing to move or custody them. This removes operational friction, enables instant settlement, and allows every trade to be provably solvent and auditable in real time.

No credit risk. No centralized settlement. No synthetic liquidity.

How Carbon Solves It

Carbon solves the liquidity and access problem by integrating real-world trading venues into a unified on-chain interface.

Our intent-based solver system acts as a hybrid bridge:

• Users sign an intent (e.g., “long AAPL at 5x”)

• Solvers compete to fill the trade

• Solvers hedge across venues like Binance, Bybit, and TradFi brokers

• Settlement happens fully on-chain, ensuring transparency and finality

This gives users access to real liquidity from the most liquid markets in the world — including:

• 900+ crypto pairs via Binance and Bybit

• 200+ TradFi CFDs via global brokers (coming soon)

Instead of trying to replicate TradFi on-chain through synthetic assets, Carbon brings actual execution liquidity to the chain through solver-based hedging.

A Unified Global Exchange

Carbon is designed to become the Everything Perp DEX — one venue for all perpetual trading:

• Deep liquidity across both crypto and TradFi

• Unified intent-based interface

• Transparent execution and solvency

• Real-world assets without the friction of tokenization

As capital continues to move on-chain, the need for a true cross-market, on-chain execution layer becomes increasingly apparent. Carbon exists to solve that — by connecting what has always been disconnected.