Joining Paradigm as Head of Trading

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

My relationship with markets started long before I knew what trading was, let alone what a market maker did.

As a kid, I spent hours unknowingly making markets on the Grand Exchange in RuneScape, buying items, reposting them slightly higher, managing inventory, and learning, sometimes painfully, what happens when liquidity disappears. Around the same time, I was trading Pokémon cards, basketball cards, and anything else with perceived value on the playground, and obsessing over virtual economies in Neopets and Webkinz. None of it felt like finance then. It just felt like figuring out how complex systems worked.

That curiosity eventually became a career.

I started in U.S. equities at Citadel Securities, working in arguably the most developed and competitive market structure in the world. There, I learned how deeply microstructure, incentives, and quantitative discipline matter when margins are thin and mistakes are unforgiving.

From there, I moved into crypto, first at Blockchain.com, where I saw the realities of building and operating CeFi market infrastructure at scale, and later at FalconX, where I focused on crypto derivatives, portfolio risk management, and liquidity across some of the most volatile and fragmented markets in existence.

Across every role, the throughline has been the same: how to price risk accurately, how to manage exposures responsibly, and how to build systems that hold up when markets are stressed, not just when conditions are easy.

Paradigm sits at a unique intersection of these ideas. The firm doesn’t just invest in crypto markets. We help shape them. From protocol design and mechanism research to long term alignment with builders, Paradigm takes markets seriously as first class systems, not just venues for speculation.

As Head of Trading, my focus will be on operating our trading and market infrastructure in a way that reflects that philosophy. The approach is disciplined, research driven, and deeply aligned with the long term health of the crypto ecosystem and our portfolio. That means thinking carefully about capital deployment, risk management, market structure, and how trading activity can support, rather than distort, the protocols and networks Paradigm believes in.

I’m excited to work alongside market makers, researchers, and founders who are pushing the boundaries of what crypto markets can be, and to help Paradigm continue to be a thoughtful, principled participant in them.

If you’re building markets, designing mechanisms, or thinking deeply about how capital should move in decentralized systems, I’d love to connect (rama@paradigm.xyz).