Curtis Chen (Chutian)
Curtis Chen (Chutian)
Co-founder, Quanta Edge · Hong Kong · cchencs@connect.ust.hk
LLMs have made search cheap wherever an answer can be checked, and that turns research and engineering into one question: how fast can you check?
We apply it to trading, where answers are priced every second. Agents search for strategies and for the chips that run them; a fast, frozen judge decides what survives.
We are building the next generation of high-frequency trading infrastructure on that loop.
What I am building
Quanta Edge builds high-frequency trading infrastructure where both layers are searched by agents: strategy production, and the low-latency stack beneath it. A handful of people write the exam; agents write the strategies and the hardware. The judge is frozen, out of the agents’ reach, and fast: a candidate is tested thousands of times on recorded data, in simulation and in quick builds before it touches capital. Live trading is the slowest, least repeatable test there is, so we do not test there; live results are reconciled against the evidence, never fed back into it. We trade our own book on this infrastructure and provide it as a service.
Three bets behind it:
- Strategies become inventory. The asset is the process that regenerates them, and the record of what each was tested against.
- Hardware follows. One strategy, one piece of silicon, searched by agents and judged on the device.
- Verification speed decides the winner. The firm that can test a candidate in seconds, on data, in simulation or in a quick build, and do it again, beats the one that waits to find out live.
What I have built
Futuristic Group, 2025–2026: the trading firm I founded and ran before this.
Sharpe 4.3
Agent alpha, live
Agent-mined signals on 50 crypto markets, run live through a partner fund. +10.3% net of costs in five months, max drawdown 1.5% (May to September 2026).
+500% in a month
Prediction markets, on-chain
A high-frequency book on Polymarket’s five-minute BTC markets: about 3,000 public trades in two months, and a top-30 leaderboard finish.
3 DEXs
Designated market maker
Market maker for RWA (real-world assets) on three on-chain perp exchanges, providing primary liquidity for tokenized equities and crypto.
Open questions
- Can a check carry information when a candidate’s evidence is the same size as the noise the search itself produces?
- Where is the line between what the system may rewrite and what it must not, and how do you know, from inside, that it was crossed?
- How fast can a judge be without lying? Replays, simulators and partial builds are cheap and repeatable, and the agent will learn to fool them. What must be measured, and what may be simulated?
Join us
HFT trader
AI researcher
Chief Scientist
If one of the questions above is already yours, especially if you think we have it wrong, write to me.
Earlier: AI research at Megvii, and reinforcement-learning trading at Graphen, New York. Columbia (M.S. Computer Science) · Peking University (Economics) · Tsinghua (Engineering Physics). Full CV