DRW Trading Group

So backstory, how do I get into compute? So I start my career off as energy option market maker in Chicago.

I work for DRW Trading.

Um, so that was really fun.

In a way, right, compute is another form of a commodity.

And how did you get it-- how'd you get your first customer?

It was, it's really fascinating.

So I think, so obviously, um, so Don Wilson, um, he's former CEO for DRW Trading.

So obviously, when I was at DRW, I was a junior trader.

It also wants at least one option that works with multi-party computation for institutional custody.

DRW and Marex have completed what S&P Dow Jones indices and Keiko call the first over-the-counter derivative.

referencing a fully tokenized index.

The total return swap ran on Derivnex's platform on the Canton network.

Yep, exactly.

And, you know, as we were piecing together where we fit in the market and who our competitors are, we're talking of firms like DRW and Citadel, uh, which are some of the largest trading companies out there.

So exactly.

How can a team of, like, 30 to 40 people compete with that? So ultimately, though-

And that's where the major players are.

So crypto, Jane Street, DRW, Wall Street players.

The guerrillas that they have will not dare to use the tactics they use on Binance, on the New York Stock Exchange, because they've been in jail.

But they can.

It's like Bitcoin is a football.

DRW team does not want to play against Jane Crypto at all because they're both good.

There's no referee in the football match.

They don't want to play each other.

And self-awareness is another really interesting one.

Hyein Park, who was head of power and gas at DRW at the time, says, "The way to fail is-" Is to try to trade a style that is incompatible with your personality.

And this is really important for me, and I see this a lot at present, especially in intraday.

So there isn't one way to make P&L.

Think about the high-frequency trading firms in Illinois.

Think about just the big market participants like DRW, Jump.

I mean, this would've been devastating.

All these guys would've just left.

The problem with all of this is that whenever a large pool of enthusiastic retail money shows up somewhere, the professionals are usually not far behind.

According to the Financial Times, large quantitative trading firms like Susquehanna and DRW, firms that normally act as market makers on stock exchanges, are now setting up dedicated prediction market desks.

They're reportedly paying traders base salaries of $200,000 a year to build algorithms that systematically identify mispriced contracts on these platforms.

So on one side of the trade, you have a person betting on the Super Bowl because it seemed like fun, and on the other side you have a machine that does this 24 hours a day and never gets excited about anything.

Well, it was really this summer that all of these institutional market makers had their interns doing prediction market trading and pricing.

Jump, you know, DRW, Galaxy, all of these ones.

So very different paradigm just in the past year.

I'm going to go back to something you said earlier and push back a little bit.