Federico Carrone

I grew up in Argentina, where you learn early that money breaks, institutions fail, and the systems people depend on are more fragile than anyone admits. That shaped everything I build now.

Through LambdaClass I build Ethrex, one of the fastest Ethereum clients, a new programming language called Concrete designed around a formally verified kernel, and Lambdaworks, a cryptographic proof library used in production. I built the underwriting engine for Levenue, Europe's largest revenue-based financing platform. I'm helping develop a bank and a payments platform replacing broken financial rails in Latin America. Through Ergodic Group I hold companies across distributed systems, AI, gaming, wine, and culture. This site is where I write about what compounds over time rather than what trends today.

When Risk Models Create Risk
Series · The Edge of Chaos

When Risk Models Create Risk

· 10 min read

The last essay said the tail is too hard to measure. Jón Daníelsson goes one step further: in finance, the measurement itself changes the thing measured. When everyone uses the same risk model, the model becomes a synchronization device. The answer is a system designed to survive without everyone trusting the same number.

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Latest

A Proof Is Only as Good as Its Spec
Article

A Proof Is Only as Good as Its Spec

Formal verification doesn't eliminate risk. It relocates it into the spec, the model, and the trusted base. Five runnable Lean 4 proofs that compile cleanly and still sit on real bugs.

· 17 min read
The Limits of Knowing
Series · The Edge of Chaos

The Limits of Knowing

Every method in this series rests on one number: how close a system sits to its edge. Nassim Taleb spent a career arguing that this is exactly the number you cannot trust. For fat-tailed systems the d…

· 9 min read
Why the Calm Is Dangerous
Series · The Edge of Chaos

Why the Calm Is Dangerous

A system heading for a tipping point gives off warning signs in unexpected places. The danger rarely arrives as drama and rising volatility. It hides in the calm. Ecologists learned to read it in lake…

· 9 min read
What Actually Moves Prices
Series · The Edge of Chaos

What Actually Moves Prices

The series has argued that markets move themselves, but there is now a clean mainstream number for that claim. Gabaix and Koijen estimate that one dollar flowing into the stock market raises aggregate…

· 9 min read
Reflexivity by the Numbers
Series · The Edge of Chaos

Reflexivity by the Numbers

Everyone agrees markets react to themselves. The question is how much. A statistical tool built for earthquakes turns that vague idea into a single number: the fraction of market activity that is the …

· 8 min read
A Fact-Producing Compiler
Series · Concrete

A Fact-Producing Compiler

Concrete already reports facts about authority, allocation, recursion, loop boundedness, trust, fingerprints, and proof evidence. The next step is making those facts queryable.

· 5 min read
CommitLLM: How to Verify an LLM Inference
Article

CommitLLM: How to Verify an LLM Inference

LLM APIs ask you to trust that the provider ran the model and settings they advertise. CommitLLM adds cryptographic receipts and audits without zero-knowledge prover costs.

· 6 min read
What Concrete Makes Worse
Series · Concrete

What Concrete Makes Worse

Concrete's constraints have real costs. Linear cleanup is verbose, no closures hurt composition, and the ecosystem barely exists. Here is what the language actually makes harder.

· 7 min read
When the Compiler Is the Oracle
Series · Concrete

When the Compiler Is the Oracle

I ran an autoresearch-style loop on a Concrete program. The compiler told an agent where authority, allocation, and proof surface could improve and confirmed when those properties changed. No profiler…

· 18 min read
Self-Replicating Programs Emerge from Random Noise
Article

Self-Replicating Programs Emerge from Random Noise

Turing completeness is a shallow pit you fall into. Self-replication is an even shallower one. A recent paper shows that self-replicating programs spontaneously emerge from soups of random code, no de…

· 16 min read
Why Concrete Exists
Series · Concrete

Why Concrete Exists

Concrete is a systems language designed so the compiler can reason about what code does: authority, allocation, resource lifetimes, and proof surface.

· 7 min read
Crypto doctrine
Article

Crypto doctrine

Crypto found product-market fit where trust is weakest: inflationary or censored economies, and internet-native communities that need programmable coordination and markets.

· 3 min read
Zero-Knowledge Proofs and the Economics of Verification
Article

Zero-Knowledge Proofs and the Economics of Verification

The proving-verification asymmetry in zero-knowledge proofs is what makes them economically meaningful: proving is expensive, verification is cheap, and that gap changes what systems can be built with…

· 5 min read