I work on settlement — the part of a market that decides whether a trade is real.

Leading

Business development at Node.Monster. I own the commercial relationships with the networks themselves — validator onboarding, staking partnerships, and the deals that come with them.

Building

Swap.Monster, a non-custodial institutional RFQ marketplace on Canton. Post an RFQ, compare dealer quotes, settle atomically in Daml. Live on mainnet; second place at the first HackCanton.

Negotiating

Listing and revenue-share agreements with token and RWA issuers, clause by clause.

Shipped

Took Node.Monster through SOC 2 end to end, from gap analysis to final audit.

Tinkering

An AI-agent pipeline that runs my daily market intelligence, outreach drafting and account follow-ups, so my hours go to conversations instead of admin.

Not right now: consumer crypto, advisory seats, and anything that needs its own token to make sense.

1. 01

   Settlement is the product.

   Most of what gets sold as infrastructure is a wrapper around someone else's settlement guarantee. The guarantee is the part worth owning.

2. 02

   Stablecoins stopped being a crypto story.

   They are mainstream settlement infrastructure now. The competition has moved to three things: regulatory standing, security, and how fast money actually settles.

3. 03

   Tokenization is the easy half.

   Putting an asset on a ledger is close to solved. Giving someone a venue where they can move size at a fair price without leaking their intent is not.

4. 04

   The market is smaller than it looks.

   In institutional crypto the addressable universe is a few hundred entities, and they all talk to each other. An overstated claim does not cost you a reply — it costs you a relationship.

5. 05

   Sell like an operator.

   Understand the product deeply enough to design the deal around what the customer actually needs. A deal you had to oversell is a renewal you will not get.

6. 06

   Ship the good first version.

   I would rather put something real in front of someone and iterate than protect a perfect version that never leaves the building.

• Payments providers compete on three axes now: regulatory standing, security, and settlement speed. Almost everything else is packaging.
• Merchants want the fastest, safest settlement and the freedom to choose what they settle in — a USD stablecoin or local fiat. That choice matters most in high-inflation markets, which is where the real demand is coming from.
• Agentic settlement is the next step: agents running payroll, payouts and usage-based billing inside limits a company approved once, with no accountant in the loop. The hard problem there is not the rail, it is the authorization model.
• Real-world assets are a settlement problem wearing a tokenization costume. The interesting question is not how to represent a bond on a ledger — it is who quotes it, and what happens in the two seconds between agreeing a price and owning the asset.

• Trading and Exchanges · Larry Harris

  The book on market microstructure. Most arguments about venue design are re-derivations of something in here.

• Layered Money · Nik Bhatia

  The clearest short account of why settlement sits in layers, and what each layer is actually promising.

• The Man Who Solved the Market · Gregory Zuckerman

  Less about the trades than about what it costs to hold an edge for thirty years.

• Never Split the Difference · Chris Voss

  Overused as a sales book, underused as a listening one.

Mostly market structure, negotiation, and the occasional history of a system that broke.

The first piece is in progress.

Leave a note and it lands in my inbox. Settlement, market structure, Canton, or something you are building — all welcome. You can also just email me.