About
Nikhil Padala
Infrastructure Engineer. Trader. Builder.
The Story
I started in infrastructure — the part of engineering most people treat as plumbing. I treated it as physics. How fast can bits move? What does the OS add to the path? Where is the hidden latency that nobody measures?
My first serious answer to those questions came at Akuna Capital, where I was the founding DevOps engineer for their crypto desk. I built the infrastructure that processed millions in daily volume. Speed mattered there in a way that changed how I think about every system I've touched since.
Then Gemini Exchange — Senior SRE, responsible for reliability at scale. When the exchange goes down, money stops moving. That sharpens your standards quickly.
In January 2024, I went full-time as a trader. Within months I discovered the problem I hadn't fully registered from the other side: signing latency. Every trade decision has to become a signed transaction before it hits the book. Cloud KMS adds 100–300ms to that path. Nobody measures it. Nobody talks about it. It just eats alpha quietly.
I built ZeroCopy Systems to fix it. 42 microseconds for ECDSA signing, hardware-enforced inside AWS Nitro Enclaves. That's not a benchmark — it's a structural advantage for anyone running a signing-heavy strategy.
Everything I figured out along the way — the kernel tuning, the latency measurement methods, the architecture decisions, the mistakes — I publish here. 130+ articles. Open-source tools. Original research. The only thing I keep private is my trading strategies.
What I Believe
Infrastructure is alpha.
The milliseconds between a decision and a signed, executed order are not a technical detail. They are the margin. The firms that understand this win. The ones that don't are providing liquidity to the ones that do.
Most firms get signing wrong.
Cloud KMS adds 100–300ms per signing operation. At any meaningful trade frequency, that's not latency — it's a tax. The fact that it's invisible on most dashboards doesn't make it harmless.
Self-custody doesn't have to be slow.
The assumption that custody and speed are in tension is an architecture problem, not a physics problem. With hardware enclaves and the right design, sovereign key management can be faster than trusting a centralized exchange.
The best infrastructure is boring.
Deterministic. Measured. Reproducible. If your system behaves differently under load than it does in testing, you don't have a system — you have a guess. I build and write about systems that don't surprise you.
Knowledge should be published.
Most of what I know I learned from people who were willing to write things down. I'm paying that forward. Infrastructure knowledge that stays inside firms dies with headcount changes. Published knowledge compounds.
The Numbers
Timeline
Full-time Trader + Founder, ZeroCopy Systems
Left institutional employment to trade full-time. Discovered signing latency eating alpha. Built ZeroCopy Systems: 42µs ECDSA signing in AWS Nitro Enclaves with hardware-enforced policy and attestation trails.
Senior SRE, Gemini Exchange
Exchange reliability at scale. Responsible for uptime on infrastructure where downtime has direct, measurable financial consequences. Built the instinct for deterministic, failure-resistant systems.
Founding DevOps Engineer, Akuna Capital — Crypto Desk
First infrastructure hire on the crypto desk. Built the systems from scratch — CI/CD, trading infrastructure, monitoring, reliability. The desk processed millions in daily volume on infrastructure I designed.
Infrastructure Engineering
Earlier career building production systems. Developed the foundation in Linux systems, networking, and the conviction that the substrate matters as much as the application.
Connect
Weekly infrastructure insights
One deep-dive per week on signing latency, kernel tuning, and the infrastructure decisions that separate profitable trading systems from the rest. No fluff.