Since my last post about @imperialperps in January, a lot has changed. Back then, I was looking at Imperial from the angle of its Market Token model and the idea of bringing community participation into perp markets. The concept was interesting, especially the part where people could create markets around Solana tokens rather than having everything depend on what a platform decides to list. But the team has taken things quite a bit further since then. Imperial is now building around a much bigger trading infrastructure play on Solana, with a perps aggregator that brings multiple venues into one terminal. The idea is simple: traders shouldn’t have to keep jumping between platforms to find the markets, liquidity and execution they need. Then came Armada. What caught my attention here is the focus on liquidity and execution. Armada is designed to source liquidity beyond the usual Solana venues, with the aim of offering deeper books and reducing slippage, particularly for larger trades. It also opens up access to markets beyond crypto, including equities, commodities and FX. For a team building trading infrastructure, that’s an interesting direction to take. Another major development was the $1.5M seed round led by Foundation Capital at a reported $15M valuation. That’s a meaningful step from where the project was when I first wrote about it. Looking back, the interesting part isn’t just that Imperial has raised funding or added new features. It’s how much the product direction has evolved since January. The original idea caught my attention, but now I’m interested in seeing how the aggregator and Armada perform as more traders come in and actual usage grows. Because in perps, having more markets is one thing. Getting traders the liquidity and execution they need, consistently, is what makes the difference. Definitely one I’ll be keeping an eye on. 👀