Freeport Markets

My relationship with markets started early. In high school I was trading cosmetic items in video games long before I touched a real exchange. One day, a gaming platform froze my account and years of work because I’d used bots—despite never breaking any posted rules. That was my first visceral lesson in how fragile centralized platforms are, and it’s what made disintermediated, permissionless systems feel like a necessity rather than an academic idea.

I went on to become a quant trader, working at Jane Street and IMC, and got deep into crypto during college. Trading was intellectually thrilling and financially rewarding, but ultimately it wasn’t fulfilling. What actually made me happy was building with people: I was president of my fraternity and grew the Duke Quant Finance Club from ~10 to ~200 members. That experience is what convinced me I didn’t just want to be a trader; I wanted to build an institution and a culture.

My co-founder comes from a complementary path—ex-Huawei, ex-Capital One—with startups in the family, so he never saw a “normal job” as the end state. We met freshman year of college and have been close ever since; I’ve spent every Thanksgiving with his family for years. Freeport is a direct extension of that long-standing alignment: two people who love technology and markets, who never quite fit the default track, deciding to commit the next decade to building the interface we wish existed for ourselves and our friends.

Freeport exists to solve a simple but overlooked problem: serious, long-term allocators have no clean way to access real on-chain opportunities.

Today, DeFi is overwhelmingly built for day traders and speculators. The UX, the products, and the culture are optimized for leverage, meme coins, and casino-like engagement. But the next wave of users won’t be degen traders; they’ll be households, pensions, corporates, and asset managers who care about compliance, risk, and outcomes. They want on-chain access to things like pre-IPO equity, private credit, and uncorrelated yield—without assembling protocol stacks, learning new jargon, or living on Twitter.

Our product premise is that these users should have a single, trusted interface to allocate across every major DeFi protocol. Instead of engagement feeds and leverage sliders, we focus on what allocators actually care about: plain-language risk/return and valuation context, credible issuer and governance information, and a UI that abstracts away DeFi’s operational and cognitive complexity.

This is a big problem because trillions of dollars sit in vehicles that are structurally unable to touch on-chain assets today, even as the rails mature: instant cross-chain settlement, institutional-grade lending, and tokenized private and pre-IPO assets are already here. In quant and trading communities, I see people discussing sophisticated opportunities every day but not moving real capital because the friction is too high. We’re building Freeport because we’re convinced that once the experience feels legal, legible, and low-effort, that capital will move—and someone needs to build the user-aligned interface that catches it.

Our long-term vision is for Freeport to become the default interface for serious on-chain wealth—the place where households and institutions manage their financial lives directly on neutral, composable rails instead of inside custodial silos.

In that world, people don’t need a traditional brokerage or bank to access real economic functions. Their cash sits in stablecoins, their investments live in tokenized form, and they can allocate to frontier AI companies, private credit, and hedge-fund-like strategies from a single app that feels as simple as a modern neobank and as robust as an institutional trading desk. Under the hood, Freeport is not a warehouse; it’s a router that moves capital across the best DeFi primitives, passing structural yields and efficiencies back to users.

If we succeed, the dominant business models in consumer finance change. Custodial, extractive platforms that make money by sitting between users and markets become much less defensible. Disintermediation means pure custody is a commodity; permissionlessness means global retail and international users can access assets that used to be locked in private markets; composability means every new credible primitive is quickly integrated instead of being trapped behind legacy stacks.

Concretely, a world where Freeport has “won” is one where the next billion on-chain users are long-term allocators, not perpetual traders; where serious capital can move on-chain in a compliant, intelligible way; and where the primary value accrues to user-aligned interfaces that help people build durable wealth instead of gamifying their attention. That’s the world we’re building toward.