Sai: Bootstrapping a Perp DEX on Nibiru

Key Insights

• Sai is a perpetual decentralized exchange (perp DEX) built on Nibiru that launched publicly on Feb. 18, 2026. It offers up to 100x leverage with oracle-settled pricing and pools liquidity through Sai Liquidity Positions (SLPs) that back markets and absorb trader P&L.
• The launch coincided with Let's Go Saicho, a $25,500 trading competition split into two phases. Phase 1 (Feb. 18 to March 4) rewarded the top 25 traders by percentage ROI with up to $20,000, and Phase 2 (March 5 to March 19) distributes $5,500 across volume-based tracks.
• As of March 16, TVL reached $47,211, cumulative perp volume hit $6 million, and the platform collected $21,560 in fees. Open interest peaked at $549,628 on March 3, the same day volume reached its single-day high of $1.27 million.
• Sai saw 134 unique traders, with 52.9% executing six or more trades. Returning traders accounted for 58.2% of Phase 2 daily activity. The liquidation rate dropped from 12.9% in Phase 1 to 6.7% in Phase 2 despite average leverage increasing from 33.1x to 44.2x.
• The roadmap extends beyond perps: a white-label Perps-as-a-Service product, Sai Savings with ~5% yield on idle stables, automated strategy vaults, real-world asset markets, and a mobile application positioning Sai as trading infrastructure rather than an isolated venue.

Primer

Sai is a perpetual decentralized exchange (perp DEX) that aims to simplify, predict, and make leveraged trading more accessible. Users connect to the application with standard EVM wallets, deposit collateral such as USDC or stNIBI, and trade perp markets through an interface that resembles a centralized futures exchange. They can open long or short positions, set up to 100x leverage on certain assets, and use familiar order types, including market, limit, stop, and conditional (stop-loss/take-profit) orders.

Sai was created by members of the Nibiru team with experience in distributed systems, infrastructure, and financial protocols. The creators are led by Nibiru founder and CEO Unique Divine, who has a background in applied mathematics and machine learning, as well as prior experience at IBM and Sommelier Protocol.

Sai is built on Nibiru Chain, a high-throughput Layer-1 with a unified EVM and Wasm execution environment. Nibiru combines an EVM-equivalent runtime (Nibiru EVM) and a Wasm environment in a single state machine, allowing Solidity and Rust contracts to coexist, share accounts and gas, and call each other through built-in system contracts that bridge the two VMs. Its consensus layer, Nibiru BFT, is an evolution of CometBFT, delivering fast finality and sub-two-second settlements. Alongside core modules for staking, governance, IBC, and a native oracle, this architecture provides Sai with the low-latency execution, deterministic settlement, and oracle support necessary to offer a CEX-like onchain derivatives platform. Sai’s defining characteristic is its approach to pricing and risk: execution is anchored to decentralized oracles and backed by pooled vaults called Sai Liquidity Positions (SLPs), emphasizing consistent behavior across different market regimes.

Let’s Go Saicho: The Trading Competition

Sai's public launch on Feb. 18, 2026, coincided with the start of Let's Go Saicho, a one-month trading competition designed to bootstrap both trading activity and platform liquidity. The competition runs through March 19 and distributes a $25,500 prize pool across two phases, each targeting a different type of trader behavior.

Phase 1: PnL Competition

Phase 1 ran from Feb. 18, 2026, to March 4, 2026, and allocated $20,000 to the top 25 traders ranked by percentage ROI rather than absolute profit. A trader who earned a 50% return on a $500 account could outrank a trader who earned 5% on a $50,000 account. Only closed positions counted toward PnL, and unrealized gains were excluded.

Eligibility thresholds scaled with rank. Traders competing for the top three positions needed at least $1 million in cumulative volume and $250 in profit. Ranks 4 through 10 required $50,000 in volume and $50 in profit, while ranks 11 through 25 required $50,000 in volume with no minimum profit. The prize distribution was structured as follows:

• Rank 1: $6,250
• Rank 2: $3,125
• Rank 3: $1,250
• Rank 4-10: $625 each
• Ranks 11-25: $250 each

No traders met the $1 million volume threshold required for the top three positions, so none of the top three prizes were distributed. The remaining prizes were awarded to qualifying traders in ranks 4 through 25.

Phase 2: Volume Competition

Phase 2 ran from March 5, 2026, to March 19, 2026, and shifted the incentive from profitability to volume, distributing $5,500 across three tracks. The largest pool, $4,000, is shared among all traders who cross $50,000 in volume, with each trader's share proportional to their total volume. All activity from Phase 1 counts toward Phase 2 thresholds in this segment. A $1,000 pool is split evenly among the first 50 traders to reach $10,000 in Phase 2 volume, creating an early-mover incentive. A single $500 prize goes to the highest-volume trader in Phase 2.

Unlike Phase 1, Phase 2 did not require profitability to qualify. The competition enforces rules against sybil attacks, wash trading, fake volume, and malicious bots. A minimum position holding time of 10 to 20 minutes applies during Phase 2 to discourage instantaneous round-trip trades designed to inflate volume. Winners are expected to be announced shortly.

Early Traction and Key Metrics

Volume

Cumulative perpetual volume from Feb. 18, 2026, through March 16, 2026, reached $6 million. Phase 1 accounted for $3.1 million of that total, with the final three days of Phase 1 generating $2.4 million as traders pushed to lock in PnL rankings. Phase 2 volume through March 16, 2026, totaled $2.9 million across 12 days, a higher daily average than Phase 1's first 10 days but below the Phase 1 closing sprint. Volume spiked again on March 11, 2026, at $573,420 before tapering to $36,810 on March 16, 2026, the lowest daily figure since launch, as Phase 2 approached its final days.

TVL and Open Interest

As of March 16, 2026, Sai's total value locked (TVL) was at $47,210, up 14x from $3,380 on launch day. Growth came in two distinct waves. TVL held relatively steady between $3,200 and $4,400 during Sai's first week, then increased to $15,140 on Feb. 25, 2026, and climbed to $26,650 by Feb. 28, 2026, as early competition activity drew deposits. A second leg carried TVL from $29,120 on March 5, the start of Phase 2, to $47,210 by March 16, a 62% increase over 12 days, driven in part by new SLP deposits entering the platform after Phase 1 concluded.

Open interest peaked at $549,630 on March 3, the same day perp volume hit its single-day high of $1.27 million. By March 16, open interest had settled to $27,620 as the competitive intensity of Phase 1's final days gave way to Phase 2's steadier volume-building pace.

Fees

Sai collected $21,560 in cumulative fees from launch through March 16. Phase 1 generated $19,600, and Phase 2 contributed $1,960 through its first 12 days. Daily fees peaked at $3,310 on Feb. 27, 2026, during a stretch from Feb. 24, 2026, to March 1, 2026, where fees exceeded $1,000 every day. After the Phase 2 transition, daily fees dropped sharply and remained subdued, falling below $100 on four of the first five days as trading shifted from high-conviction PnL plays to lower-cost volume accumulation.

The effective fee rate, fees as a percentage of volume, averaged 0.36% across the full period but diverged between phases at 0.64% in Phase 1 versus 0.07% in Phase 2. This gap likely reflects differences in sizing and trade mechanics. Phase 1 traders opened larger positions and held them through wider price moves to accumulate PnL, generating more fee-bearing events per dollar of volume. Phase 2 traders used smaller positions with higher leverage, producing high notional volume relative to the fees collected.

User Activity and Trade Frequency

As of March 16, 2026, Sai had 134 unique traders. The platform had an existing base of 39 traders from its private launch period before Feb. 18, 2026, and the Let’s Go Saicho competition brought in 95 additional participants, 62 during Phase 1 and 33 during Phase 2.

The trader frequency distribution reveals a relatively engaged base for a new platform. Only 3.4% of traders executed 1 trade. The largest cohort, 43.6%, executed 2 to 5 trades, while 35.9% places 6 to 20 trades. The most active decile, 10 traders at 50+ trades each, averaged 11.8 active trading days, indicating a core group that traded consistently across both phases.

User Retention

Retention patterns during Phase 2 provide a window into user stickiness. Returning traders accounted for 58.2% of daily active trader appearances from March 5, 2026, through March 16, 2026. After the March 5 spike of 60 active traders, including 37 new arrivals, daily activity settled at an average of 8.7 traders. The pattern suggests that Sai retained a meaningful share of Phase 1 participants in Phase 2 but struggled to attract new entrants after the Phase 2 launch-day momentum passed.

Risk Behavior: Liquidations and Leverage

The shift in competition incentives produced a clear change in risk behavior. The liquidation rate dropped from 12.9% of trades in Phase 1 to 6.7% in Phase 2, a 48% relative decline. This occurred despite average leverage increasing from 33.1x to 44.2x. Phase 1’s ROI-based rewards incentivized directional bets with higher risk tolerance, meaning getting liquidated was an acceptable cost to pursue outsized returns. Phase 2’s volume-based rewards penalized liquidations indirectly, since blown-up capital can’t generate more volume.

Community: The SaiClone Ambassador Program

Alongside the trading competition, Sai launched the SaiClone Ambassador Program, a three-tier progression system that operates entirely through Sai's Discord server. The program uses the Mee6 bot to track contributions and assign XP, rewarding community engagement, content creation, and platform advocacy across the following tiers:

• Saicho (levels 0-5, up to 1,624 XP): The entry tier, granted automatically upon engaging with the Discord community.
• Saiborg (Levels 6-15, 1,625-13,799 XP): Trusted, highly engaged members who receive special community recognition and increased influence on community decisions.
• Sage (Level 16+, 13,800+ XP): Reserved for top contributors. Unlike other tiers, Sage requires a formal application reviewed by the Sai team. Benefits include direct team access, exclusive merchandise, bi-monthly raffles, collaboration opportunities, and early access to platform updates.

XP accrues through trading activity, technical analysis and signals, community events, video and educational content, X engagement, bug reports, and Discord messages. The program ties community growth directly to platform usage, creating a feedback loop between trading activity and ambassador progression.

Looking Ahead

Sai's roadmap positions the platform as a trading infrastructure rather than a standalone venue. The most differentiated planned product is a white-label Perps-as-a-Service offering, with the first iteration from Coded Estate, an RWA platform that now offers perpetual trading powered by Sai. If executed, this would extend Sai's liquidity and infrastructure beyond its own front end.

On the product side, planned additions include Sai Savings, which targets ~5% yield on idle stable balances, automated strategy vaults, expanded market listings that include real-world asset-style instruments, and DeFi integrations connecting SLP vaults to swaps and routing protocols. The account experience is also evolving. Gasless trades are already live, and the team plans to add multichain and fiat funding routes, cross-chain USDC deposits via improved on-ramps, and a mobile application.

For developers, Sai plans to ship a data platform with historical data access, backtesting tools, and support for custom order types.

Closing Summary

Sai's Let's Go Saicho trading competition reached 134 traders, generated $6 million in volume, grew TVL 14x in under a month, and collected $21,560 in fees. The two-phase incentive structure produced distinct behavioral shifts, with liquidation rates halving and position sizes shrinking as traders adapted from ROI-focused to volume-focused trading. A 58.2% retention rate in Phase 2 suggests the platform established a sustained baseline of recurring users, though new trader acquisition dropped sharply after the Phase 2 launch spike.

The next phase for Sai begins after the competition ends. Whether the platform can retain its active traders without incentives, grow SLP liquidity organically, and begin delivering on a roadmap spanning Perps-as-a-Service, Sai Savings, real-world asset markets, and a mobile application will determine whether Sai converts early traction into lasting positioning within the perp DEX landscape.