Ruslan Fakhrutdinov – Extended Exchange and Vault Tokenization (S7E27)

About this episode

Today, I’m speaking with Ruslan Fakhrutdinov, the founder of Extended, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange. Ruslan is the fifth perpetual futures exchange founder I’ve had on the podcast, and that’s very intentional. Flow continues to move toward these platforms, and while trading perps can feel familiar to anyone coming from centralized or traditional exchanges, the way risk is absorbed and resolved under the hood for decentralized exchanges can be very different. In this episode, we go deep on the design of perp DEX vaults and the role they play as a liquidity and risk backstop for the entire exchange. Ruslan walks through how platforms choose between protecting system solvency, safeguarding vault depositor capital, and managing trader losses, particularly during stress events. We also discuss how settlement finality, governance intervention, and liquidation design determine where losses ultimately land. We spend time on Extended’s introduction of vault shares as collateral, why that design can be powerful, and the new risks it introduces if boundaries aren’t explicit. Ruslan lays out the risk-management waterfall: when the vault steps in as a counterparty, when it ref