Blockhouse

Many of the biggest wins in capital markets infrastructure started as trading desks. >Thomas Peterffy ran Timber Hill, an options market maker that generated billions in trading profits. > Spun the tech out as Interactive Brokers. $130B MC. You run a book, generate IP, and spin out valuable software that compounds beyond alpha. However, in TradFi, this was rare. Gated by capital intensity and access. DeFi turned exchanges, clearing, and distribution into open-source primitives. Instead of needing licenses and capital, anyone with code could ship infrastructure. And traders had the unfair advantage: they knew what was broken, and already had the volume, distribution, and infrastructure to ship into. >Talos went from crypto hedge fund to OEMS. $1B MC. >Chameleon Trading ported their market making strategies onto HLP vault, and pointed flow at exchange - Hyperliquid. $15B MC. >Ethena - Stablecoin built on basis trade. $4.4B MC. Trading businesses today might be undervalued if their IP compounds past alpha, and into infrastructure. In DeFi, these financial products ship globally and permisionlessly from day one. The desk becomes the product surface, and the product becomes the next generation of financial infrastructure. The biggest asset management businesses didn't win on returns alone. They won on infrastructure and distribution.

VCs underwriting "AI trading" assume a random amalgamation of software will magically print risk-adjusted returns at scale. This is a misunderstanding of the trading business, which at scale, is an infrastructure and operations problem - thats mostly solved. Especially the kind done by CitSec. AI will ship features faster and run the stack cheaper. The game is definitely getting harder. But you can't vibe-code a performant systematic stack. Not yet. Not at the latency, precision, or risk discipline required to actually compete.

@aadotsol Let's take a stab at it together🏠🔨

i am looking for someone to hand over my money to for: * funding rate arb tools integrating phoenix * pair trading app integrating phoenix * basis trade products integrating phoenix * prediction market trading app integrating phoenix (might build this myself over a weekend) the list goes on!

Many 8-9-figure allocators whose accounts we manage come in with prime brokers. The benefits make sense: 3:1 leverage on capital, cross-margining infrastructure, 4% borrow on BTC, and top VIP fee tiers on all exchanges. But doing this at scale is a headache: > Setting up an exchange account? 2 week approval. >Need to borrow? 3 month strategy monitoring. >Exchange rules change? Reconfigure every account. All while token and leverage restrictions handicap your returns. Want to trade RWAs, on DEXs, or prediction markets? Forget it. A new fund deploying $50M at 15% APY should clear $7.5M. But 3 months without borrow, capped leverage, and a limited token universe. You land at 9%. $4.5M. $3M gone to ops, not the market. Payroll doesn't pause. LPs won't re-up on a fund underperforming. They don't care about your set up. That's why billion dollar allocators that have never touched crypto, started with Blockhouse. Our product and relationships plug them into the best infrastructure at the best terms - generating returns from day one with minimal operational lift.

The exchange launches with day-one volume from depositors and services clients already routing through us. The stablecoin becomes preferred collateral across markets, earning yield while it sits as margin and feeding flow back into the strategies that back it. That's the loop Bybit ran with USDe. Each phase compounds the next, and owning the stack means we capture meaningful economics on every dollar of institutional capital that touches Blockhouse. This is the platform we're building, and the work that defines it is still ahead of us. We've lived through enough of the last 4 years to know we're the right team to build it. Full retrospective: blockhouse.app/blog/blockhous…

The long play is to productize the full stack as institutional SaaS, released in 3 sequential phases: Phase 1: Tokenized vaults wrapping our strategies, anchored by a yield-bearing stablecoin similar to Ethena's USDe. Phase 2: An institutional services layer exposing our internal execution, margining, and reporting stack to clients. Phase 3: The exchange itself. A matching engine for tokenized assets.

Blockhouse went from $0 to $16M in deposits in 8 months. Our clients (asset managers, funds of funds, on-chain vaults) represent $5B+ in AUM. Looks like overnight growth. It's actually 4 years of work across 2 industries finally lining up. Here's the story 🧵

@sphere_labs @chainhub_ @lightspeedvp @polychaincap 🤝

We met some incredible builders across chains and from verticals spanning ZK, account abstraction, and DeFi during the kickoff of @chainhub_ Crypto Summer Lab. Thank you to Dr. Vishwanath, @lightspeedvp and @polychaincap for putting together the program.

@jwpark02 @0xzuberg @OndoFinance soon

@0xzuberg @OndoFinance 🤔 @Blockhouse_cap