Lucas
Martín Calderón
Spent a decade building and trading
markets you didn't know existed.
Now building one you will.
The most successful companies are built by one operator on both sides.
My philosophy
Software without distribution is academia, and sales without proofs is fiction. A real spark happens when the operator bridges these two together.
Lucas builds at that intersection. That's where his innovations bend markets.
A decade of defined conviction
The builder.
As a serial founder and lead advisor to tier-one hedge funds and protocols, Lucas architected the HFT engines and liquidity models that power modern DeFi. He builds the invisible physics of the market to ensure systems remain trustless, efficient, and unbreakable.
Current focuses
Three rooms.
One operator.
Each one is its own stack. Tap a card to read the story.
kash.bot
VC-backed startup
Founder & CEO
Leading the technology vision and closing the deals at Kash. From AMMs to AI oracle councils to the platforms and regulators that take it to market.
- Social-native markets
- On-chain & verifiable
- Founder-led product
Lucas leads the technology vision and the strategic direction. He architects the layers that make a prediction market work at social scale — from bonding-curve AMMs to the AI oracle councils, and the infrastructure that ties them together. He designs the system and closes the deals with the social platforms, protocols, investors, and regulators that take Kash to market.
The vision is simple and audacious: turn the social feed into the world's largest prediction market. Every opinion priced. Every call settled. The social internet, where billions of takes already get expressed daily, finally gets a layer where being right carries economic consequences. Kash is what the next layer of the internet looks like. He's just early to building it.
Prediction-Market HFT
Tier-1 hedge funds
Lead & Advisor
Advising Tier-1 crypto hedge funds. Led prediction-market HFT teams running multi-million-dollar systems at sub-microsecond latency.
- HFT engine design
- Market microstructure
- Division leadership
Lucas advises Tier-1 crypto hedge funds and has led the prediction-market HFT teams building multi-million-dollar systems at sub-microsecond latency. The work is the kind where systems either hold under adversarial flow or they don't. He made the calls about what to ship, what to optimize, and how to price risk — mastering market mechanics, liquidity, and the economic mechanisms that drive accurate, efficient, and stable outcomes. The same calls built Kash.
Market Infrastructure
Speaker · PhD · Grants
Builder & Engineer
From bonding-curve AMMs to zk-based KYC and AML tools, with engineering and government collaborations behind them.
- First bonding-curve AMMs
- zk-based KYC & AML
- FBI, UAE & USA forensics
Lucas turns deep technical work into systems people actually use: AMMs, deterministic AI, zkTLS, zkKYC, and AML systems. The work is grounded in academic excellence, with engineering collaborations and published papers across UCL, Stanford, and other top institutions.
Lucas's expertise was forged at the FBI and other world-class institutions. His work has been funded by the British government and leading global financial institutions. He specializes in researching and developing advanced tools for anti-money laundering (AML) and cryptocurrency forensic investigations across the UAE and USA.
The work travels. He has been invited to speak at Davos, ETHDenver, RWA Summit, DappCon, and other top-tier conferences on AI, blockchain, and cryptography: the three layers he's spent his career proving belong in the same conversation.
Selected writing
Where research
meets markets.
Articles, essays, papers, and talks on blockchain, AI, and hardware behind some of the most advanced systems in the space.
PETs4DeFi — Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for DeFi
Co-led a €3.5M European Innovation Council program (~1% acceptance) that built the ZK toolkit, zk-KYC, and compliance-by-design stack letting DeFi hold privacy and regulation in the same hand.
Hardware Optimisations for Crypto High-Frequency Trading and ZKPs Part I
CPUs vs GPUs vs FPGAs — and why FPGA is the right substrate for low-latency MEV strategies and ZK proof acceleration.
Achieving superior blockchain security with SGX and ZK proofs
Fatal SGX vulnerabilities and how multi-prover systems — combining SGX with ZK proofs and FHE — harden rollups.
Verkle Trees: Everything You Need To Know
How Verkle trees collapse Merkle proof sizes by ~7× — and where they sit in Vitalik's Ethereum end game.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Full Guide, Part IV
From Zero to Knowledge: modular arithmetic — the engine room behind ZKP soundness and efficiency.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Full Guide, Part III
From Zero to Knowledge: proof systems — NP, IP, PCP, IOP and how zk-SNARKs / zk-STARKs descend from them.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Full Guide, Part II
From Zero to Knowledge: polynomials — how they encode data, relations, and enable efficient comparison in ZKPs.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Full Guide, Part I
Scalability vs. privacy on public chains — and why zk-SNARKs are the cryptographic bridge between them.
Neural Networks: Back to Basics, Part I
From a one-weight pricing model to gradient descent — the cleanest path I know into the fundamentals.
AI Expert Retro Talk Part III: LLMs and chatGPT
How transformer LLMs actually work, why scale stops mattering, and what InstructGPT changed about steerability.
AI Expert Retro Talk Part V: Attention is All You Need
A deep dive into attention — from seq2seq's blind spots to self-attention, transformers, and what came next.
Get in touch
Let's talk.
Available for advisory, speaking, and strategic collaboration around prediction markets, AI, and social mechanics.