Crypto markets are usually described as a clean break from traditional finance: decentralized matching, no privileged actors, anyone can provide liquidity. The day-to-day reality looks a lot more like the equities and FX markets that established high-frequency trading firms already dominate — same latency-sensitivity, same arbitrage pressure, same advantage for whoever has the better infrastructure. This paper, written for the Harvard Business Analytics Program, looks at blockchain markets through the lens of HFT infrastructure and asks what a firm like Citadel Securities — with deep capital, low-latency systems, and decades of institutional microstructure knowledge — would need to do to compete on-chain. It draws on what I observed working alongside ETF Market Making technology at Citadel Securities.
Read the paper: Citadel Securities: Seizing the Blockchain at the Speed of Light.