The Uncomfortable Truths About Your Infrastructure
I don't do "tech trends" panels. I speak about the physics of profit and the fiduciary negligence of renting variance from Amazon.
The Lazy CTO Thesis
Why technical leadership has abdicated responsibility to AWS, creating a generation of engineers who don't understand how computers work.
- The "infrastructure risk" of shared tenancy
- Why "Cloud Native" is a slur in HFT
- The $1.5B/year "Jitter Tax"
The Physics of Profit
Alpha decay is governed by the speed of light. If you aren't controlling the atoms, you are the yield for someone who is.
- Speed of Light vs. Fiber Index
- Why 100 meters = $10M/year
- The end of "Software Eating the World"
The Infrastructure Edge: Why Milliseconds Equal Millions in Crypto
How signing latency affects trading returns. Real benchmarks from production systems.
- Measured latency cost in live crypto markets
- Where your signing stack is bleeding alpha
- Production benchmark methodology
Self-Custody at Wire Speed: Building Sub-100µs Signing in AWS Nitro
Technical deep dive into enclave-based signing architecture. How we achieve hardware-attested key isolation without sacrificing latency.
- AWS Nitro Enclave internals and attestation flow
- VSOCK, KMS, and the signing hot path
- Benchmarking methodology: wall clock vs. p99
The Physics of Profit: Linux Kernel Tuning for Trading Systems
From THP traps to CPU isolation. The kernel settings that determine your latency floor — and the engineers who skip them.
- Transparent huge pages, NUMA, and interrupt affinity
- CPU isolation and real-time scheduling policies
- The checklist every trading firm should run before go-live
Host Cheat Sheet
Nikhil Padala is the founder of ZeroCopy Systems and a Sovereign Infrastructure Architect. Formerly a founding DevOps engineer at Akuna Capital's crypto desk and Sr. SRE at Gemini, he specializes in quantifying the financial cost of technical variance. He argues that in high-frequency markets, infrastructure latency is not an efficiency problem—it is a fiduciary negligence problem. He builds "Zero Jitter" systems that reclaim the alpha lost to the cloud.
- ZeroCopy Systems (Founder)
- Akuna Capital (HFT Crypto)
- Gemini (Exchange Infra)
- Low-latency infrastructure
- AWS Nitro Enclaves & TEE architecture
- Linux kernel performance tuning
- Crypto exchange architecture
- MEV infrastructure & block building
- Self-custody & signing systems
Book a Talk
Available for conferences, podcasts, and corporate training. Reach out via LinkedIn or email.
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