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Lauris

I like thinking about systems and how to best formalize them from a market structure perspective.

How they form, why they fail, what emerges from the wreckage. Mostly I'm trying to understand information failure: who knows what, who can't know what, and what happens in the gap.

I've been a heavy reader all my life. Philosophy first — which placed me as an International Philosophy Olympiad laureate in high school. Studied at the London School of Economics with distinction.

If I had to frame what I like thinking about the most, I would call it exploring legibility, order and systems that have convexity dynamics.

Currently writing on why prediction markets will displace derivatives for binary risk.

Projects and Products

As an operator, I have built products that have generated 8-figures in gross spend, seven-figures in fees and have, in total, acquired six-figures in activated users. As a DeFi operator, my company was one of the first to partner with brands such as Berachain and Pudgy Penguins.

Bounded Catallaxy 2026–

Combining frontier engineering with theory to study points of failure in order, legibility, and equilibria.

Multiplier 2024–2025

A social casino with spot market interactions. Users play and win long-tail assets. A system for taking non-rotational capital and injecting it into spot markets.

Insrt (Blast) 2024

A fun gambling experience for NFTs and real world assets.

Insrt 2022–2023

Yearn for NFT financialization. We combined fractionalization and yield-generation legos for NFT finance.

Vaal 2020–2021

Building the European version of dv01. A plumbing engine for securitization that we built with some of my best friends from the LSE.

Selected Writing
The Library and the Shibboleth
  1. 01 Seeing Like a State — Scott

    The map is not the territory and how a map can kill millions.

  2. 02 The Venture of Islam — Hodgson

    Civilizational history at its best.

  3. 03 Models of Bounded Rationality — Simon

    We all satisfice to our computational and emotional limits.

  4. 04 On the Nature of Things — Lucretius

    The most beautiful poetry ever written.

  5. 05 The Count of Monte Cristo — Dumas

    Patience as strategy. The revenge plot as mechanism design problem.

  6. 06 A History of Philosophy — Copleston

    The topography of the history of thought.

  7. 07 Critique of Pure Reason — Kant

    The only thing that still annoys me is that the Terminus is the Manifold.

  8. 08 Theory of Value — Debreu

    Beautiful, rigorous, and wrong in exactly the ways that matter.

  9. 09 Law, Legislation and Liberty — Hayek

    Cosmos versus Taxis. Spontaneous order versus constructed order. The source code for everything I work on.

  10. 10 Genetic Epistemology — Piaget

    The biological precursor to Kantian epistemology.

  11. 11 The Concept of the Political — Schmitt

    Sovereignty. Friend/Foe. Which is which?

  12. 12 Collected Poems — Cavafy

    Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say it was a dream, your ears deceived you.

  13. 13 The Origins of Political Order — Fukuyama

    How institutions actually form. The state, rule of law, accountability and why most places fail to get all three.

  14. 14 The Swerve — Greenblatt

    How Lucretius got rediscovered and changed everything. Ideas have material histories.

  15. 15 Fanged Noumena — Land

    I just want to note that I like Land non-performatively.

  16. 16 From Third World to First — Lee Kuan Yew

    Whoever rules must have that iron in him. This is not a game of cards. This is your life and mine.

  17. 17 Changing Fortunes — Volcker & Gyohten

    Monetary history from the people who made it. Central banking as craft, not science.

  18. 18 With the Old Breed — Sledge

    War as it actually is. The corrective to every abstraction about conflict.

  19. 19 On War — Clausewitz

    Friction, fog, the continuation of politics by other means. Strategy as dealing with uncertainty, not eliminating it.

  20. 20 Simulacra and Simulation — Baudrillard

    We live in a hyperreality and it is only getting more strange. A prophetic monograph.