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“Draw a distinction.”
G. Spencer-Brown · Laws of Form

I work on how states of the world become financial markets.

My work connects event contracts, derivatives, and corporate risk through systems design and legal structures—from exposure discovery and contract design to execution, margin, and institutional ownership.

Read on X Explore research

Now

Lately, prediction markets as an asset class. I am in the early formation of a new venture with a senior FICC co-founder, researching origination and swaps.

Also:

  • advising portfolio companies
  • consulting major exchanges and policy centers on event contracts and market design (below)
  • exploring and designing event-contract structures with potential originators
  • writing on X
Formation

Philosophy first.

International Philosophy Olympiad laureate in high school, then a first and a distinction at the London School of Economics. Internships at leading law firms followed.

My academic research at the LSE centered on systemic risk: pathological contagion models, Arrow–Debreu securities, and permutations of those securities structured around swaps. A separate strand examined the economic efficiency of the ISDA Master Agreement / CSA structure.

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 am trying to understand information failure: who knows what, who cannot know what, and what happens in the gap.

Previous work

Vaal

2020–2021 · Built and sold

The European version of dv01: a plumbing engine for securitization, made with some of my best friends from the LSE.

Insrt Labs ┐

2022–2025 · Founder

Founded and ran Insrt Labs for 39 months. Five audited products explored three versions of the same microstructure problem: fractional ownership and yield, just-in-time inventory, and routing new demand into long-tail spot markets. Wound down December 2025.

  1. Multiplier 2023–2025

    Gamified leverage trading app. Partners included the Solana Foundation and Raydium Foundation.

  2. Insrt 2022–2023

    Fractional ownership over onchain intellectual property.

Independent work

2026–

Independent research and advisory work across market design, secondary-allocation transactions, major exchanges, and policy centers.

Work

Research work.

Research publication

Statebook

Markets for every state of the world.

An interactive policy publication developed in collaboration with the Hyperliquid Policy Center. It shows how real businesses could use perpetuals and event contracts against risks that ordinary listed markets do not match. The cases and figures are synthetic.

Statebook publication showing markets for every state of the world
Markets for All States of the World Working paper

An order book organizes liquidity by contract. A statebook organizes executable liquidity by terminal payoff. The paper asks what must be true before that relationship becomes tradable: common state definitions, explicit payoffs, firm routes, and risk treatment that survives settlement and default.

In development

Research project

SLAM

Seeing Like a Market.

An empirical and theoretical research program on the institutional adoption of event-risk contracts and synthetic perpetual futures. It began with the original Seeing Like a Market paper, presented at the inaugural Kalshi Research conference in March 2026.

Seeing Like a Market research program
Visit SLAM Original paper State Risk Premium citation

Public reference

Hedgebook

Corporate exposure, matched to live contracts.

A daily-updated public reference connecting Kalshi event contracts to the S&P 500 companies they reference. The current edition contains 500 company dossiers, 47 market pages, and roughly 2,500 issuer–market links, with traditional-market analogues alongside them.

Hedgebook connecting event contracts to S&P 500 companies
Explore Hedgebook

Prototype

BizHedge

Matching business risks to live event contracts.

Describe what could hurt the business in ordinary language. BizHedge searches current Kalshi markets, identifies the strongest legitimate relationship, and makes the cost, payout, and remaining risk legible. If no market genuinely fits, it says so.

BizHedge mapping a business exposure to a live event contract
Try BizHedge
Objects

Four operations behind the work.

These projections form a vocabulary for market structure, not an illustration of any one product. Each view isolates a different operation on the same state space.

  1. 01 · Boundary World → states

    A boundary turns a continuous outcome into discrete claims with explicit terminal payoffs.

  2. 02 · Equivalence Paths → exposure

    Different instruments and portfolios can approach the same economic state by different routes.

  3. 03 · Correspondence Risk ↔ claim

    An exposure either aligns with an available claim or remains visibly unmatched.

  4. 04 · Residual Exposure − coverage

    Coverage removes part of an exposure; the unhedged distance is the object that remains.

Writing

Selected writing.

Essays and working notes on event risk, corporate hedging, and exchange design. Longer pieces are archived here; shorter notes stay on X.

A hedge is not a product

14 Jul 2026

A hedge is not a product

A contract can be bought. A hedge has to be constructed around an exposure.

Read the essay
Statebook A coherence layer above isolated books, organizing contracts by the states in which they pay. The exchange stack is converging Venue labels increasingly describe the front door, not the payoff stack. Credit already trades event risk What €800bn of synthetic risk transfer teaches event markets about institutional ownership. Compute, sliced four ways The level, the shape, the residual, and the jumps—and the instrument each one gets. Philosophical Precision Is the New Assembly Precise conceptual vocabulary as a control language for agentic reasoning.
View all writing
Library

Library.

Books I return to.

  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 Laws of Form — Spencer-Brown

    The calculus of distinction. The mark at the top of this page comes from it.

  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.