Many builders in the Uniswap ecosystem come from diverse backgrounds. In my conversation with Panoptic's CEO, Guillaume Lambert, we explored how his academic physics background led him to discover the "cheat code" hidden within Uniswap v3—creating a new paradigm for options trading and revolutionizing passive LP experiences through Panoptic's gRHO liquidity interface.

**How did your background in academia translate to DeFi?**I transitioned from a traditional academic path in Physics (undergrad, PhD, multiple postdocs, faculty position) where I specialized in biological physics—niche but cutting-edge research. While I had heard about Bitcoin, it was Ethereum that truly captured my interest. During COVID, I had more time to explore crypto deeply, first as a user of MakerDAO v1 and Uniswap v1/v2, before becoming a liquidity provider on Uniswap v3 when it launched in 2021.

Uniswap v3's mechanics fascinated me, and I was eager to better understand it by approaching it as any other academic topic: by studying it from first-principles and examining its underlying mathematics. That research led me to discover that Uniswap v3's liquidity provisioning model closely resembles options trading, which had some parallels with my physics background: Volatility directly relates to physics concepts like temperature and diffusion.

**How did your relationship with the Uniswap Foundation begin?**I received the first grant from the Uniswap Foundation in 2022, which helped me take a sabbatical from Cornell. Having the Foundation's support was a signal that this was something people value. I forked the Uniswap v3 interface and added features useful for position setup and tracking. For example, I was showing the implied volatility (IV) of each Uniswap v3 pool, which is what I would use as signals for entering and exiting my positionsThe support from the Uniswap Foundation allowed me to consider DeFi more seriously as a career path besides academia, which at this point was very much still my dream job.

**What does Panoptic do?**At Panoptic, we’re enhancing the LP side of Uniswap v3 and v4. We rewrote the position manager contract from scratch to add more features to enhance the user experience for LPs. What we allow through Panoptic is accessing leverage, shorting assets from the protocol itself, and most importantly, shorting someone else's LP token. But the important aspect of all this is that Panoptic is still sending funds into the same Uniswap pools as the old manager contract.

The key unlock for Panoptic is opening up a previously unreachable side of the market by allowing users to short LP tokens. When you borrow and short an LP token, you take the opposite side and effectively buy an option. For example, you might borrow ETH, and when the price changes, pay back USDC at a different rate - this is a call option because you are effectively buying ETH for a price that’s lower than the current price.

With Panoptic, we created what looks like a traditional options platform but using Uniswap as a clearing house for assignment, security, and price oracles. There was a cheat code hidden all along that turned Uniswap into an options protocol, and we enabled this.

We could have forked Uniswap, but we'd lose the network effect of swappers and solvers. Our $1.5 million in liquidity rests on top of Uniswap's $3 billion. We don't have to compete - we're depositing equity on what exists, taking advantage of the order flow and liquidity while enhancing the LP side.

**What should people know about the v4 liquidity interface gRHO?**We see Panoptic and Uniswap as a liquidity hub for all financial activities. Integrating with v4 means we can add lending and many other features through our gRHO platform.

The gRHO platform lets passive users lend coins to LPs and active traders. But the key difference with other lending protocols is that we only allow funds to be borrowed and moved into Uniswap - they never leave that ecosystem. This means that if you need to liquidate someone, you can just repossess their LP position and repay their loans, which makes it safer than traditional lending where someone might buy a mansion you can't repossess.

The gRHO platform also aims to bring passive LPs back to the Uniswap ecosystem because many of them don't want to deal with rebalancing and range management. By acting as a lender, passive LPs can just deposit ETH or USDC and generate yield on those deposits. Lending to options traders is slightly more risky, but yields should be higher as well.

**Why did you choose to make gRHO open-source?**I believe that the long-term success of blockchain technology is through open source, open access, and permissionless everything. Having this be closed source would be contrary to that narrative. Some chains have billions of dollars under closed source software, but I'm not comfortable with that approach. Composability is also very important, and we implement the 4626 standard for across all Uniswap v4 pools, so other protocols could also use these deposits from passive LPs as collateral.

**What are you building next?**Our current version works on both v3 and v4, but we’re not quite able to support all existing hook designs. The next step is growing markets and expanding to all v4 pools. We're releasing an oracle hook to make integration with other hooks easier.  We are also developing vault strategies for passive users. You could for example have delta neutral vault trading options in Uniswap v4 using Panoptic, which would earn a yield based on volatility with minimal capital risk.

**What's your broader vision for Panoptic and DeFi?**I admire Uniswap's decision of building in the open, and enabling permissionless hooks development. Hooks are like exposing the inner machinery so you can modify anything. The long-term strategy isn't just 'token goes up,' but reinventing finance to be more fair and accessible.

It is very difficult for retail users to access options in their brokerage account  - they gatekeep it and can only be accessed by traders with 10 years of experience.

In DeFi, we're trying to reinvent finance with rails that are more open and accessible. Maybe users lose a little money when they’re in the arena trying things, but as long as they do not invest more than they’re comfortable losing, they actually have the opportunity to try it out and learn, which is not something that’s even possible for most in TradFi.

The goal of Panoptic is to help people understand the “superpower” of options trading and help them see options as a core component of their investment strategies. Options aren’t just about speculation and asymmetric bets, but also about risk management and hedging against potential losses. DeFi users are often more sophisticated than TradFi users - they're prepped to be at the forefront, adapting and creating a more financially fluent ecosystem- so trading options should be in their DNA.

Note: The views expressed herein may not reflect the views of the Uniswap Foundation. This interview is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice.