Federico Carrone
Building and writing at the intersection of technology and culture.
Paris
I started building companies in Buenos Aires, where people assume that anything not designed to survive failure will eventually fail. That habit of expecting things to break has been useful for building infrastructure.
Now
Right now most of my time goes to:
- Ethrex
- One of the fastest Ethereum execution clients.
- Concrete
- A systems programming language whose code can be proved correct in Lean.
- Lambdaworks
- A cryptographic proof library used in production.
- pamm.wtf
- Ethereum infrastructure built with our partners. Billions of dollars flow through it every month.
- Spawned
- A Rust library for Erlang-style concurrency boundaries.
- CommitLLM
- A cryptographic commit-and-audit protocol for open-weight LLM inference.
- CommitBoost
- An Ethereum validator sidecar for community-built proposer commitment protocols.
- Options Portfolio Backtester
- An open-source options backtester with realistic execution and a Rust core.
- CCSD
- The cryptography and distributed systems center of the University of Buenos Aires. It works on post-quantum cryptography, consensus and privacy, and I direct its academic committee.
- 421
- A magazine about culture and technology.
In November 2025 the Science and Technology Committee of the Argentine Senate gave me a Mención de Honor al Valor Científico. A thank-you, and who actually earned it.
Technology is most of my work, but not all of it. I also invest in AI, gaming, wine and culture, and in all of them I look for things that keep their value when fashions change.
Companies
LambdaClass
I started LambdaClass more than a decade ago to build infrastructure that other teams depend on. We work on protocol engineering, systems programming and formal verification, including Ethereum infrastructure, zero-knowledge cryptography and the Concrete programming language.
Ergodic Group
A private holding company with investments in distributed systems, AI, gaming, wine and culture. I look for businesses that become more valuable with time.
The holding company is named after long-run convergence. At the software company we try to prove that our systems are correct instead of assuming it. The writing is about why patience and friction matter more than speed. To me they are connected, because in all of them I try to build things that hold up over time.
Who I am
I grew up in Argentina reading Jules Verne and wanting to see the world. I spent my early twenties travelling and taking more risks than I should have, and I made plenty of mistakes along the way.
When I was around twenty-five I had lunch with my uncle in Madrid and told him, with more confidence than sense, that I was going to change my life and build companies. That conversation changed a lot for me. I founded LambdaClass more than a decade ago, then Ergodic Group, and now I’m building 421.
I live in Buenos Aires. I keep a strict routine, I train, and I read a lot of philosophy and history. I watch anime and films and play games with the same attention I give to papers. I care about wine and architecture, and much more about the people around me.
How I think
I think there is a difference between lived time and measured time. Measured time is the same everywhere and you can trade it. Lived time accumulates, and each year changes what comes after it. Most of what matters gets lost when you force it into metrics and deadlines.
During the day I work on formal systems, proofs, type systems and verified kernels, where you can check whether something is correct instead of arguing about it. At night I read philosophers who say that certainty is impossible.
Growing up in Argentina I saw money break more than once, and I saw that nobody comes to rescue you when it does. Broken money doesn’t test your character, it just breaks people. Markets are one of the best ways humans have found to coordinate, but they don’t fix themselves on anyone’s schedule. That’s why I build systems whose guarantees come from how they’re built rather than from promises. I trust code that enforces rules more than institutions that say they do.
I believe people matter more than institutions, and still I build protocols designed so that nobody has to be trusted, because systems that need everyone to be good don’t work. The cost is that we may end up building a world that doesn’t need the kind of person worth building it for. I wrote about that in When Civilization Escapes the Human.
Technology alone isn’t enough for me. It needs culture, beauty and some idea of what a person should become. That’s why I started 421, and why the Library on this site matters to me as much as the essays.
Choosing hard things has been good for me: training, competing, taking risks and working on things that might fail. Hard things that simply happen to you are different, and they can break you.
From the outside, software, cryptography, finance, education, wine, games, architecture and philosophy look like separate interests. For me they are all versions of the same question, which is how to build something that lasts and is still alive.
How I write
These days I write with an LLM, mostly Claude. I was skeptical for years. What I actually type are ideas in fast, messy drafts, with bad grammar and worse spelling, and the model organizes them and makes them better. The ideas and arguments are mine, and so are the mistakes. I don't really write this for others. Making it public just forces me to improve it.
The process is simple. I write drafts and discuss them with the model until the spelling, the grammar, and the flow are what I want. If it writes something I wouldn't defend in person, that sentence dies. Nothing gets published that I wouldn't stand behind in an argument.
Ideas matter only insofar as they survive contact with reality over time.
Find me
I read everything that gets sent to my email. I reply when I can; sometimes it takes weeks.