FLOPs, Futures, and Forwards with Architect

Last week, we co-hosted FLOPs, Futures and Forwards with Architect at Blockhouse’s New York office.

Architect operates AX, Architect Exchange, a regulated perpetual futures exchange. Our existing relationship includes the Blockhouse vault, powered by Pareto and Royco, which finances Bedrock Strategies. Bedrock’s trading includes market making in equity perpetuals on AX.

Architect’s compute business brokers block transactions in compute capacity and structures OTC swaps on compute and memory. Architect is preparing the American Innovation Exchange to offer GPU compute futures and options, pending regulatory review.

At our event, attendees compared the conversations to compute events where participants sign introducer agreements at the door and start trading compute.

We connected suppliers and offtakers with financiers, insurance counterparties and residual-value structurers around potential transactions. That put capacity, funding and risk allocation into the same conversation, with counterparties who could address different parts of a potential deal.

Other topics included the supply and demand developing around decentralized cloud compute and uncensored inference. We also discussed the dynamics of the compute credit crunch and the development of insurance products and residual-value swaps.

For Blockhouse, this work includes sourcing financing and offtake and connecting counterparties for rental-rate and residual-value protection. We are also preparing for compute market making, with the contracts, venues and risk management specific to those markets.

On the hedging side, finding a counterparty is only part of the work. A contract tied to a published index can leave exposure to the difference between that benchmark and a company’s realized prices. Our Compute Hedging post covers that basis risk, exposure analysis and bespoke hedges.

Thank you to Architect for co-hosting and to everyone who joined us. If you are buying, selling or financing compute, speak with our team.