Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal have launched Leap, a mobile trading app run as a Solana Labs company. It covers crypto, stocks, ETFs, commodities and tokenized assets, and it has drawn debate over competition with independent Solana builders.
Solana Labs has moved into consumer apps. Co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly) and Raj Gokal launched Leap on November 5, a trading platform introduced as a Solana Labs company.
Users can trade several asset classes in one mobile app, including cryptocurrencies, stocks, ETFs, commodities, currencies and tokenized versions of stocks and ETFs.
What Leap offers traders
The Home tab carries daily curated market stories on tokenized stocks, ETFs, commodities, currencies and cryptocurrencies. Leap also emphasizes profit and loss tracking, building its portfolio view around breakeven prices that account for deposits, withdrawals and trading fees.
Leap currently charges no platform trading fees, although users still pay network and routing costs, estimated upfront for each trade. However, the company plans to add trading fees later and to direct part of that revenue toward buying and burning SOL tokens and funding referral rewards.
The app works with Jupiter for trade routing, Helius for infrastructure, and Birdeye and Tokens for market data.
Dialect team builds the app
The team behind Dialect, which Solana Labs acquired earlier this year, is developing Leap. Chris, who leads the team, said people repeatedly asked why it did not build a consumer app of its own.
Gokal acknowledged the risks of entering a competitive market. According to CoinGape, he said: "Solana is intensely competitive, and we are likely to fail,"
Competition with ecosystem builders draws debate
The launch has sparked debate over whether Solana Labs could compete with independent ecosystem developers. Some community members have questioned whether a company closely associated with the network's development should enter markets where independent Solana businesses already operate.
Yakovenko posted that Solana Labs is building a product that will compete with everything. He later clarified that Solana Labs operates separately from the Solana Foundation.
Source: CoinGape
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