Joining Paradigm as Head of Trading

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Paradigm as the Head of Trading.

I became interested in markets long before I knew trading was a career. In grade school, I spent hours unknowingly making markets on the Grand Exchange in RuneScape. I’d buy in-game items, repost them higher, and manage my inventory. At times, I’d get stuck holding something nobody wanted. Before then, I traded Pokémon cards, basketball cards, and anything else with perceived value on the playground. None of it felt like finance or markets at the time. It was simply a game of figuring out what something was worth, and how to trade it into something better. Lucky for me, I eventually realized I could make a career out of that curiosity.

I started by trading U.S. equities at Citadel Securities, working in the most developed and competitive market structure in the world. I learned to think quantitatively about execution and risk, and how prices form when everyone reacts to the same information. Margins were razor thin and mistakes were unforgiving.

Crypto was different. At Blockchain.com, I helped build and operate global market infrastructure at scale. At FalconX, I focused on derivatives, portfolio risk management, and liquidity across some of the most volatile and fragmented markets in existence.

In traditional markets, you largely operate inside systems that have developed over decades. In crypto, you trade while also watching the same market constantly evolve. Regardless, the underlying challenges are similar: pricing risk, managing exposures, and building systems that work when markets get disorderly.

That’s partly what drew me to Paradigm. While investors back the best founders, researchers work on interesting problems, and builders turn ideas into products, trading can bring another perspective: what happens when those systems meet capital, liquidity, and risk.

As Head of Trading, I’ll be focused on our market infrastructure: how we execute, hedge, manage risk, and deploy capital across the portfolio. I’ll also spend time on questions that sit between trading, investing, and research: how liquidity develops around new asset classes, how incentives shape market behavior, and what changes as markets move onchain.

I’ve spent my career so far in highly developed markets, and then in markets that were still taking shape. At Paradigm, I have the opportunity to work on both. If you’re a market maker, researcher, founder, or builder thinking about market structure, mechanism design, or how capital moves onchain, I’m reachable at rama@paradigm.xyz.