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Lauris

I think of myself as a Forward Deployed Philosopher: technical competence across a few domains, plus natural language programming (writing and posting to materialize ideas), pointed at global practical problems that carry real theoretical weight.

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.

Philosophy first. International Philosophy Olympiad laureate in high school, then graduated from the London School of Economics.

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.

Now

Lately, prediction markets, as a novel asset class. Currently, I am in the formation phase of a new venture, which is a convergence of the work I have been doing the past decade.

Outside of that, I am:

advising portfolio companies
working on research projects, independently or with larger market players (below)
exploring and designing event-contract structures with potential originators
writing on Twitter
Research and Objects

My previous academic research at the London School of Economics centered on systemic risk: pathological contagion models, Arrow-Debreu securities, and permutations of those securities structured around swaps, which led naturally to my interest in the institutional use of event contracts. A separate strand examined the economic efficiency of the ISDA MA / CSA structure.

SLAM: Seeing Like a Market

A Lakatosian research programme on prediction-market microstructure. An initial Thesis Manuscript was its first artifact, not the programme itself. Presented at the inaugural Kalshi Research Conference alongside Cyril Goddeeris, Toby Moskowitz and Robin Hanson. Interactive at slampaper.xyz.

Hedgebook H

Maps every company in the S&P 500 to the Kalshi event contracts pricing its key risks, each paired to its traditional-derivative analog. → hedgespx.com

Projects and Products

As an operator, I have built products across consumer markets and financial infrastructure.

Insrt Labs
2022–2025

I ran Insrt Labs for 36 months across the consumer-crypto cycle: NFT financialization, onchain gacha redemption, then gamified spot-market routing. Raised $3m in external capital pre-product against 8-figures in topline spend processed. Shutdown in December 2025 after the market changed.

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. Brand ambassadors FaZe Kay and Bryce Hall; ecosystem partners included the Solana Foundation and Raydium. I was working with my close friend and Head of Growth Gritcult on distribution.

Insrt / Blast
2024

One of the first onchain gacha redemption products. Just-in-time inventory mechanism designed under capital constraint. People made money and had fun.

Insrt
2022–2023

Yearn for NFT financialization. Fractionalization and yield-generation legos; partnerships included Metastreet (now usd.ai), Pudgy Penguins and the Berachain ecosystem.

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.

LSE Systemic Risk Centre

Researcher. Worked on financial contagion models and the propagation of systemic risk across interconnected institutions.

Writing

Twitter highlights. Mostly prediction markets, microstructure, mechanism design, and market regimes.

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.