AI-native research & idea platform
Kinetic AlphaAlpha in motion.
Research on the markets that are still being built — predictive markets, perpetual futures, commodity complexes, and compute. Three questions run through everything here: how should it be collateralized, where is the structure mispriced, and what does the trade look like. Every piece ships with a dashboard you can drive.
Read the research
Papers on emerging derivative structures — perps, predictive markets, compute futures.
Drive the dashboards
Every idea ships as an interactive tool. Browse the full catalog, organized by market.
Meet the author
Daniel Kaufman — risk, derivatives, and collateral frameworks, built AI-native.
Focus areas
Four corners of the work.
Each focus area sits where the textbook ends a few pages too early — where collateral structures, settlement conventions, and listing pathways are still being figured out. The research anchors on those structural questions; the dashboards make the math visible.
Predictive markets
Kalshi, Polymarket, and the CFTC event-contract framework. Cross-venue dispersion, milestone-basket arbitrage, swap mechanics, ETF wrappers.
Perpetual futures
The CFTC's onshore approvals are reshaping perp design. Funding mechanics, collateral models, single-product synthesis of multi-leg trades.
Commodity markets
ICE EU, ICE US (IFED), NYMEX, Nodal. Factor decomposition, cross-exchange margin, hub/zone basis — the structural plumbing of energy risk.
Emerging markets — compute
Compute as the first new major commodity in decades. Index hierarchy, dispersion trades, and a supply curve already priced into power-market basis.
Latest research
The writing behind the work.
Four curves, one commodity — Kalshi's implied compute curve, and the race to price the GPU term structure
Kalshi launched compute forward curves on July 14, 2026 — binary event ladders settling on Ornn prints, the first liquid, executable forward pricing in the compute complex, live before either announced futures contract has listed. That makes four venues on three curve technologies and two settlement philosophies: event-implied (Kalshi), perp-funding + EFP futures (Architect), quote-assessment term curves (CME × Silicon Data), and transaction-VWAP futures (ICE × Ornn) — and three of the four settle on Ornn-family indices. Launch-day implied forwards from the real strike ladders (H100 ≈ $2.52, B200 ≥ $7.00, a stale monthly ladder pricing an implausible 24% two-week collapse), an eight-entry arbitrage monitor from the desk-plan taxonomy, and the compute spark spread with both legs finally quoting.
Single-stock futures vs. the swap desk — a balanced threat assessment for the $34.5B prime & financing franchise
CME lists the first US security futures since OneChicago on July 27, 2026 — into a year when equity perps went live on a US exchange, single-stock perps hit $62B/month offshore, and the SEC-CFTC opened the portfolio-margining question. Anchored on the leveraged single-stock ETF swap tape (T-Rex/Tuttle and Defiance MSTR funds paying OBFR +13-17% to Cantor, Marex, and Clear Street), the PB netting math a listed contract can't replicate, and the index-TRF precedent that already ran to completion. Plus the no-arbitrage rebuttal to "lower margin, no debit rate on shorts" — worked to the dollar. Threat map, moats ranked by durability, interactive 4-tool dashboard, two PDFs.
Offshore perpetual futures — margin, liquidation, and the October 10 stress test
$19B liquidated in hours, 1.62M accounts, 87% longs — the largest crypto liquidation in history exposed how each major offshore perp venue's design choices actually perform under stress. Side-by-side comparison of Binance, Bybit, OKX, Hyperliquid, dYdX, and the regulated Coinbase / Deribit alternative across 18 dimensions: margin methodology, liquidation routing, insurance funds, ADL ranking, mark price, funding mechanics. Interactive dashboard + flash-crash simulator.
Litigation outcomes as predictive contracts — a phased listing plan and a perpetual on the index
$79B in top-10 US class action settlements in 2025, a $19.4B litigation finance market, and $300B+ in pharma patent cliff exposure through 2030 — all currently absorbed by D&O insurers and shareholders rather than a liquid hedge. A four-phase listing plan (binary → multi-state → timing → perp-on-index), 16 candidate cases with $1T+ aggregate exposure, full perpetual design with cash-carry funding, and why the Kalshi precedents clear most of the regulatory path. Interactive case explorer inline.
A Gold/Silver Ratio Perpetual — turning a structural macro trade into a single-tick product
A proposed CFTC-regulated perpetual referencing COMEX GC/SI front-month VWAP, with cash-carry-anchored funding. The arbitrage triangle against two-leg cleared and the ETF pair, full bid-ask and margin economics, the index methodology, and the funding-rate formula — with an interactive dashboard for cost-benefit, funding decomposition, and venue ranking.
The Compute Complex — congealed electricity, the index dispersion, and the pre-listing trade
CME × Silicon Data and ICE × Ornn filed compute futures in May 2026 on structurally different indices — quote-based assessment vs Asian-averaged transaction VWAP. A six-level hierarchy (benchmark / grade / region / firmness / tenor / venue+credit), the four legs of the SD-vs-OCPI dispersion (the first listed-market trade), and how the compute supply curve is sitting in public interconnection queues right now, pricing PJM and ERCOT basis 12-36 months ahead of compute. Interactive dispersion dashboard inline.
Predictive market ETFs: what's filed, how the swaps work, and two concepts the market hasn't priced
Three sponsors filed 24 prediction-market ETFs (Roundhill BLUP/REDP/BLUS/REDS/BLUH/REDH; Bitwise; GraniteShares); SEC paused them May 5. A walk through the TRS plumbing that makes a 1940 Act fund possible on a CFTC event contract, the binary return profile, plus two unbuilt concepts — predictive signal ETFs and overlay products — with an interactive sizing dashboard.
Perps come onshore: what the CFTC's May 29 approvals change about contract design
The CFTC approved Kalshi's BTCPERP as the first US-regulated perpetual, issued a policy statement on listing perps, and cleared a Coinbase pathway to Deribit — all in the same 48-hour window. A walk through what a perp actually is, what knobs designers turn, and how the offshore (Hyperliquid HIP-3) and onshore (Kalshi DCM) paradigms compare.
The platform
Where the ideas become tools.
Every research piece ships with an interactive dashboard. These three are the standalone platforms — comprehensive enough to use as analysis tools in their own right. The full catalog, organized by market and use-case, lives on the dashboards page.
Energy complex decomposition
The full ICE / NYMEX-CME / Nodal energy complex — 70+ gas delivery points, power by ISO → hub → zone with its marginal gas hub, crude by region × grade × application — decomposed into dated factor legs with open interest and volume per contract. New: the ATLAS vs VECTOR case study, a $5.07B offset book against a $2.66B conviction book, proving risk lives in the net, not the gross.
- Factors
- 430+
- Contracts
- 470+
- Case study
- $7.7B analyzed
Compute × Power Trading
Connects the compute supply curve (chip TDP × deployment × PUE × utilization) to power-market basis trades across PJM, ERCOT, WECC, and CAISO. Supply curve, zonal basis projector, spark spread, take-or-pay optimizer, cross-zone trade synthesis.
- Zones modeled
- 6
- Forward years
- 2026-2030
- Tabs
- 5
Perps × predictive — cross-asset margin analytics
Bitcoin and SPX perps against Kalshi binary strips on the same underlying. Net delta, PnL curve, implied vol surface, live Kalshi feed — plus an interactive 5,000-path Monte-Carlo of the 8-cluster portfolio margin framework.
- MC paths
- 5,000
- Clusters
- 8
- Underlyings
- BTC + SPX
The Lab
AI-native side projects, beyond markets.
DankeSuper
An AI-native data analysis side project — the same agent-driven build pattern behind Kinetic Alpha, applied beyond markets.
Next AI projects
Data ecosystems, agent-built research workflows, analysis pipelines in non-financial domains — surfacing here as they ship.
The thesis
Four convictions that drive the work.
Collateralization is the load-bearing question
How a derivative is margined determines who can hold it, at what size, and against what other positions. Every piece here is, at root, an exercise in finding the right collateral structure for a market still figuring out its own. The trade follows the margin.
Market developments are the source of inefficiency
New listing pathways, new index methodologies, new regulatory frameworks — these create the structural inefficiencies that survive long enough to be tradeable. Reading the rulebook filings early is itself an alpha source.
Synthesis is what the platform is for
Trade ideas live at the intersection of asset classes, venues, and regulatory regimes. A GSR perpetual borrows from cleared futures, OTC swaps, and ETF pairs at once. The dashboards are the synthesis layer.
You are the developer
AI has collapsed the time-to-solution curve. Every project here was built in days, not quarters — by one person, end-to-end. The most important change in finance this decade is who gets to build.
Building something AI-native in finance?
Collateralization frameworks, new derivative structures, market microstructure, agent-built research workflows — happy to compare notes or take a look at the problem.