ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Checkout Flux 4.0 here: https://www.flux.live/flux4/index.html Lucas Schuermann started a market-neutral quant fund in his Columbia dorm room, trading stat arb across FX and early crypto markets, before dropping out to scale it into Q Capital. In this episode of Odds on Open, he breaks down how he electronified Genesis Trading's OTC desk as VP of Engineering — taking a phone-and-Telegram trading operation to a fully electronic market-making system with HFT execution — and why flow, capital, and trust are the real moats in market making, not speed. He explains the biggest misconception about HFT firms and market makers like Jane Street, Jump, and Citadel Securities, and why having flow and economies of scale matters more than latency.Lucas then dives into building Variational, first as a crypto prop shop trading DeFi and OTC derivatives, and now as one of the largest on-chain perps trading platforms — a broker-like model with zero-fee trading, aggregated liquidity, and a new swaps instrument that fixes the funding rate problem with perpetual futures. We cover perps vs swaps vs spot mechanics, total return swaps, internal vs external market makers, RWA perps, and why he believes the cypherpunks already won. Plus: how to identify trends worth riding using growth-curve data, why asset prices are uncorrelated with industry durability, how to build expertise in a technical domain fast, and the role of hubris in career differentiation for young quants, traders, and founders.
