Simran Singh, CEO and Co-Founder of Monaco, joins the Amberdata Derivatives Podcast to share insights from his journey trading oil at Goldman Sachs to building liquidity infrastructure in crypto. He explores how volatility, market structure, and risk management shaped his approach, and how Monaco aims to bring regulated, capital-efficient trading to tokenized assets. This conversation bridges traditional finance, DeFi, and the evolving world of onchain markets.
In this episode of the Amberdata Derivatives Podcast, Greg Magadini sits down with Simran Singh, CEO and Co-Founder of Monaco and former trader at Goldman Sachs and GSR. The discussion spans commodities, crypto derivatives, volatility strategy, and the structural evolution of financial markets. Singh brings a perspective shaped by trading oil during historic dislocations and later building liquidity infrastructure across centralized and decentralized crypto venues.
Singh began his career on the oil desk at Goldman Sachs, initially in risk management before moving into a trading role. His early years coincided with one of the most extraordinary events in commodity history. In April 2020, WTI crude oil futures settled at negative $37.63. The collapse was driven by a global pandemic, a supply war between major producers, and limited physical storage capacity.
The event exposed the limits of standard pricing assumptions. Lognormal option models such as Black 76 were no longer sufficient once prices crossed zero, prompting a shift to normal modeling frameworks. Front month liquidity evaporated, bid ask spreads widened dramatically, and near term gamma became difficult to price. Longer dated volatility proved more stable than the front of the curve as market makers pulled back from short term exposure.
For Singh, the episode reinforced a key lesson. Models are helpful tools, but positioning, liquidity, and real world constraints ultimately define market outcomes. That experience would later shape how he viewed crypto derivatives.
Singh transitioned into crypto in 2022 by joining GSR. Motivated by the innovation of automated market makers and decentralized exchanges, he saw crypto as a convex opportunity. If the market matured, he could help shape its infrastructure. If it failed, his derivatives background would remain portable.
At GSR, he worked across staking, token market making, NFTs, and eventually DeFi trading. His focus was porting centralized exchange strategies into onchain environments and capturing arbitrage opportunities across venues. The work highlighted both similarities and structural differences between traditional finance and crypto.
In commodities, equities, and rates, derivatives markets are anchored by natural hedgers such as producers, airlines, corporates, and asset managers. These participants create two sided flows that stabilize volatility surfaces and support deeper liquidity.
Crypto derivatives have historically been dominated by retail and speculative flow. Yield enhancement strategies such as covered call overwriting have compressed implied volatility and influenced skew dynamics. Singh notes that altcoin options have struggled to scale because there is limited natural hedging demand to anchor pricing.
The launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs introduced new structural flows. Institutional investors brought systematic call selling and more traditional volatility strategies into the market. In some cases, ETF options liquidity has rivaled offshore crypto venues. Still, Bitcoin is largely treated as a risk asset rather than a reserve asset, which supports continued volatility selling behavior.
From a trading perspective, Singh favors volatility carry structures in certain environments. Long front month gamma paired with short back month vega can benefit from term structure compression and event driven moves. He also prefers asymmetric wing structures when implied volatility appears broadly fair but tail risk is underpriced.
His broader philosophy is straightforward. Volatility selling can be profitable for extended periods, but regime shifts can unwind crowded positioning quickly. Elections, ETF approvals, and macro shocks often trigger those transitions.
Within DeFi, Singh focused on adapting high frequency and delta one strategies to automated market makers. While decentralized options and structured products have seen innovation, liquidity remains the binding constraint. Without sufficient depth in the underlying markets, exotic products struggle to gain sustainable traction.
Arbitrage opportunities between decentralized venues and centralized exchanges exist, but capital efficiency limits scalability. Singh emphasizes that robust margin frameworks and risk engines, long refined in traditional markets, are necessary for institutional adoption onchain.
These observations led Singh to co found Monaco, a decentralized exchange centered around a central limit order book with a regulated first architecture. The goal is to bridge crypto native markets with tokenized securities and commodities.
Singh argues that tokenized equities have not taken off because they lack incremental utility. Without the ability to borrow, lend, or post tokenized shares as collateral, investors have little reason to hold them onchain rather than through traditional brokerages.
Monaco aims to address this gap by combining compliance infrastructure with capital efficient market design. The protocol will support spot markets, perpetuals, and prediction markets, using offchain matching and onchain settlement. Seamless fiat onramps and cross EVM compatibility are core design priorities.
A central theme in the conversation is risk management. While much of crypto focuses on throughput and latency, Singh believes that margin models, liquidation logic, and circuit breakers are the true foundation of sustainable markets. Traditional exchanges have spent decades refining these systems.
Incorporating tools such as limit up and limit down mechanisms can help ensure orderly markets and protect participants during periods of stress. For Singh, institutional adoption depends less on speed and more on resilience.
Singh avoids absolute predictions, but he sees a high probability that financial infrastructure will increasingly migrate onchain. With exchanges exploring extended trading hours and tokenization standards advancing, the convergence between traditional finance and crypto is already underway.
From negative oil to decentralized order books, the conversation highlights how derivatives practitioners sit at the intersection of liquidity, risk, and innovation. As market structure evolves, the core principles of capital efficiency and disciplined risk management remain constant.