XR Trading

XR Trading bet early on the physics of speed. In 2017 it took a minority investment from McKay Brothers, the firm that builds ultra-low-latency microwave networks between exchanges, a tell that XR competes where microseconds decide the trade. The Chicago firm, founded in 2002 and funded entirely by its partners' capital, casts itself as a derivatives specialist providing liquidity across products and venues.

Its culture deliberately collapses the wall between the people who design strategies and the people who code them, with traders, engineers, and quants working as one team on in-house software. XR also runs leaner and more distributed than its global derivatives ambitions suggest, offering fully remote roles, and it joined the Pyth oracle network in 2021 to engage with on-chain market data.