The House EdgeHow on-chain trading really works

A business reader's guide. Follow a single dollar from a trader's wallet to its final resting place — and see, at each step, which actors took a cut, why, and from whom.

Read the outline

Production status

Adversarial thesis

On-chain trading is a layered economic game in which most participants are systematically disadvantaged in ways they don't see, and a small number of actors capture most of the value. The book makes that game legible.

TradFi-fluent

Written for a former Goldman MD who recently joined a fintech. NYSE, Citadel, Renaissance, Knight Capital, payment for order flow — the analogues do the heavy lifting.

Follow the dollar

Every chapter ends with a "Who wins, who loses, why" verdict. Every extraction technique gets a "who pays for this?" paragraph. No hype, no doom.

What this site is

This is the local reading view for The House Edge, an in-progress 12-chapter explainer on on-chain trading market structure. The repo is structured around a strict three-phase agent workflow: research note → chapter outline → draft, with a separate review checkpoint between each phase.

Use the sidebar to read the chapters as they're produced. Each chapter folder collects four artifacts:

Spec — the brief (Nick writes this)
Research — Phase 1, the sourced research note
Outline — Phase 2, the chapter outline
Draft — Phase 3, the chapter itself
Review notes — the agent's self-check

How to read

If you're new to the project: start with the Outline, then read the Book Bible to understand the voice and the through-line argument. The Chapter Spec Template shows the structure every chapter follows.