In this episode of The Sunny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray talks with Ash, founder of Kemet Trading, a crypto trading infrastructure company that has processed more than 40 billion dollars in notional volume. A software engineer by training, Ash spent years building trading infrastructure at a major Wall Street hedge fund before becoming the first global head of platform for one of the world's largest fixed income platforms. Personally involved in crypto since 2014, he explains why he left traditional finance to build the institutional grade infrastructure, derivatives support, and multi venue connectivity that digital asset markets lacked. The conversation covers Kemet's origins in 2022, the collapse of FTX and its lessons on counterparty risk, the challenge of trading large size across fragmented, 24 hour crypto venues, and why prediction markets are quickly becoming a legitimate asset class for institutions. Ash also reflects on his early Ethereum conviction, the realities of connecting to immature exchange infrastructure, and why he believes financial markets are heading toward an always on, agentic future where machines increasingly drive execution alongside humans.
Kemet Trading's founder Ash explains why institutional crypto derivatives, fragmented liquidity, and prediction markets point toward an agentic, always on financial future.
What is Kemet Trading?
We provide infrastructure for institutions, buy side, sell side, asset managers, hedge funds, market makers and dealer desks, to manage the trade lifecycle around digital asset derivatives. We support perpetuals, options, futures, and increasingly RWAs, equities, pre IPO stocks and commodities across the many venues in crypto, letting institutions trade on screen at real size and scale their operations.
What pulled you into crypto market structure specifically rather than the trading side everyone else was chasing?
I'm a software engineer by training. I worked at a large Wall Street hedge fund, then became the first global head of platform for the largest fixed income platform in the world. I've been personally involved in crypto since 2014, and I became convinced this market would become how the world trades value, which meant institutions and derivatives would follow, but the infrastructure simply wasn't there.
Infrastructure is the least glamorous layer in this industry. Why did you pick it?
I believed money and value would become digital and always on, the same way the internet made everything globally accessible. Making the jump from traditional finance into crypto was a real risk few people with this background would take. There's a very small pool of professionals who understand institutional trading infrastructure, and someone had to build tools that could speak that native, always on language.
What did you believe about crypto markets five years ago that you no longer believe today?
I first heard about Bitcoin in 2012 as a sophomore and didn't think it was a big deal. Ethereum was my real aha moment, decentralized compute you could pay for without a big cloud provider controlling it. I saw the trading patterns clearly, but the tooling to actually act on them for institutions simply didn't exist yet.
What's the most expensive lesson you've learned about counterparty risk?
We're a pure technology provider, we never hold client funds, so it wasn't direct counterparty risk for us. But when we started building in 2022, FTX was one of the largest venues, so we built integrations with it, and by December that venue no longer existed. That taught us to build deep, defensive integrations and really understand how clients assess risk.
Kemet has processed 40 billion dollars in notional. What broke on the way there that you didn't see coming?
A lot broke because we're limited by the maturity of the venues we connect to, and many are far behind on their own infrastructure. We learned never to trust API docs, venues often behave differently at scale than documented, and even if a party says they'll do X, nothing stops them doing Y. That meant constant stress testing and deep relationships across the ecosystem.
Prediction markets went from a curiosity to a real asset class fast. Why did that happen?
The 2024 elections were a proof point, prediction markets were remarkably accurate and ahead of where the broader market was. Now institutions, insurers and hedge funds are looking at event contracts as a way to hedge or structure trades around specific outcomes, like a Fed rate decision or a CPI print. It's not the most capital efficient yet, but it's getting cheaper as it grows.
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