Hi everyone! My name is Ed Yap and I’m thrilled to apply to the ONE Liquidity DAO as governor.
As someone who has spec’d/built HFT strategies, infrastructure, trading op tools, I know that Hummingbot has come a long way in equipping individual and smaller shops with a competitive trading setup. The Liquidity DAO will push that vision even farther.
And I believe I can help with that, especially on the trading side. Here is a short list of my background that is most relevant to the role:
- Long-time trader with a focus on market making. I started my career as a professional trader at Jump Trading in 2007 working in a team of FX traders. A big chunk of our strategies made markets and we were often in the top 5-10 in volume for the primary exchanges for FX spot and derivatives at that time. After Jump, I formed and co-lead my own prop trading teams or startups at Automat, Tower Research Capital, Dexterity Capital, and Lightwell Labs.
- Led and formed trading teams and companies. In 2010, I joined an HFT startup in London with a teammate where we formed and co-lead our quant team. That kickstarted my journey into the creation and business side of things. I’ve since started 2 trading autonomous teams within larger companies and 2 crypto trading startups.
- Creating a roadmap and executing through uncertainty. As the main trader in two companies I cofounded, Dexterity and Lightwell, I mapped out our strategies, business plans, and trading tools and operations including which strategies to pursue, how to backtest them, how to fund them, and how to maintain/optimize them.
- Experience in (trading) crypto. I’ve been working in cryptocurrency since late 2017 when I started out working with others in trading on dexes on the ethereum network (back then, the popular dexes were largely Etherdelta, Forkdelta, Bancor, and 0x). That turned into Dexterity Capital in 2018 when we pivoted into market-making on centralized exchanges and where we had billion dollar volumes every 2-3 days (sometimes in a day) by the end of that year. I continued to a different type of directional, medium-frequency strategy after Dexterity when I formed Lightwell Labs with a friend.
- Love for algorithmic trading. I have always believed that trading is one of best jobs (or even hobby) in the world. Specifically, as someone who loves working with numbers and testing models/hypotheses, algorithmic trading provides a satisfyingly short feedback loop in creating a hypothesis, validating the model, and improving the strategy.
- Now an educator on the exchange side. To round out my crypto experience, I recently joined a cryptocurrency exchange startup on the Lightning Network where I spend a good chunk of my time thinking of how to increase liquidity and other issues that show up on the sell-side. Although I work there as a “quant engineer” with a focus on working on our derivatives products and the exchange, I wear many hats and have spent a good amount of time teaching internally and externally about the markets and trading in general to help people understand that landscape. I started an educational series of short articles called “Long Story Short” on our company’s blog: https://kollider.medium.com/. Here is a recent example: The Joys of Algorithmic Trading and Backtesting | by Kollider | Nov, 2021 | Medium
I think that the DAO will do a lot of good for moving this space forward and I’m excited to potentially be part of it. I appreciate your consideration.
Thank you,
Ed
(If you’re curious for more, please feel free to reach out to me and/or check out my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmond-yap/)