Nikhil Padala · Newsletter, Sundays
I study reliability at every scale: infrastructure, markets, and the mind.
I write about first principles of DevOps, trading, and emotional martial arts.
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Founder, ZeroCopy Systems. Building the infrastructure layer for agentic AI: TEE-based execution, deterministic guardrails, and production observability for systems where agents handle real capital. Previously Akuna Capital and Gemini Exchange.
Latest: Sovereign Trading Infrastructure: Why the Next Generation of HFT Will Run Inside Enclaves
Three ways to work together.
Pick the engagement that matches your current need. Most teams start at Advisory, expand to Fractional after the first audit. First architectural deliverable typically within 2–3 weeks of kickoff.
Advisory
$5K / mo
- . Weekly 90-min architecture review
- . Async Slack channel for questions
- . Infra risk register + remediation roadmap
- . TEE / signing system audit
- . 30-day rolling, cancel anytime
Fractional CTO
$15K / mo
- . Everything in Advisory
- . Up to 20 hours active engineering per month
- . Attend your engineering standups
- . Hiring bar-setting + technical interviews
- . Represent you in investor / customer technical calls
- . Production AI orchestration: Letta and BAML agents for code review, test generation, dependency analysis, and documentation — under explicit guardrails, with humans on every critical path
Embedded
$30–40K / mo
- . Everything in Fractional
- . Dedicated primary focus (one client at a time)
- . Hands-on production engineering ownership
- . Full team leadership including vendor management
- . Custom SLA and escalation path
- . Engagement typically 3–6 months
Full tier comparison + FAQ on /work. Or book a free 20-min diagnostic. Lower friction than a retainer conversation.
Shipped, not promised.
Two production systems with quantified operational outcomes. The engagement economics match these numbers, not a pitch deck.
TEE Signing Infrastructure
42µs
deterministic signing · 3,095× faster than AWS KMS
ZeroCopy Systems. Full TEE platform on AWS Nitro. 40+ Rust crates. PCR0-pinned.
Read the case study →Autonomous Trading Engine
1,245
tests green · kill-switch at 6 layers · Telegram alerts
Quantfund. Paper → shadow → live pipeline. SHA-256 chained journal. LightGBM + ccxt.
Read the case study →Get the Infrastructure Edge
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Resources
Open-source tools, self-assessment, and research
Trusted by infrastructure engineers at trading firms worldwide
Open Source Tools
Linux infrastructure validator and eBPF profiler. Audit kernel settings and trace latency issues.
pip install latency-audit pip install latencyscope HFT Scorecard
Interactive 16-point assessment. Score your infrastructure against institutional standards.
The Infrastructure Edge
Private community for traders and engineers. Founding member pricing: $2,500 lifetime.
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View allSovereign Trading Infrastructure: Why the Next Generation of HFT Will Run Inside Enclaves
The ZeroCopy thesis: TEEs, MPC, and AI agents are converging to produce a new class of trading infrastructure where every operation is cryptographically provable. This is the manifesto.