On the second day of Token2049 Singapore (Oct. 8), Pete Stevenson described his company’s pitch in one image. High-speed traders run their software on a box that sits next to the exchange’s b
On the second day of Token2049 Singapore (Oct. 8), Pete Stevenson described his company’s pitch in one image. High-speed traders run their software on a box that sits next to the exchange’s box, he said. PAX is taking those two boxes and “jamming it all into one chip.”
Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of PAX Markets, spoke with TheStreet Roundtable about this new chip, what it does, and who needs it. He argued that speed and trading fees are two sides of the same coin, and that both can be fixed with hardware.
“We’re giving you a competitive market with no fees and making the high speed traders pay to get that high speed access,” Stevenson said.
Related: Vivek Ramaswamy’s Strive slips 62 places on Roundtable 100
Stevenson argues that speed has been reserved for the firms that can afford it.
“Right now, if you are an individual and you want to be trading systematically, it’s extremely difficult to compete with institutions who have invested in being fast,” he said. “PAX puts everyone on equal footing.”
PAX says its on-chip API delivers deterministic tick-to-trade latency measured in nanoseconds. That figure is the company’s own claim and has not been independently benchmarked.
Stevenson’s sharper argument is about cost. He put the price of trading at incumbents such as Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance at roughly 10 basis points and called that a lot.
PAX’s free tier charges nothing, he said, with no hidden spread, and that the high-speed traders pay for their access instead.
His estimates for his rivals are actually quite generous. It matches Binance, where regular users pay a 0.10% maker and taker fee on spot. In the U.S. the costs run higher. After a September 16, 2026 restructuring, Coinbase Advanced entry-level US spot tier sits at 0.50% maker and 0.90% taker, and Kraken’s main spot schedule starts at 0.40% maker and 0.80% taker.
PAX describes the technology as the matching engine and the trader’s hardware fused together.
“We’re implementing technology that previously ran in software,” Stevenson said. “We’re just building a custom chip.”
He compared the approach to a long trend in electronic trading of merging functions that used to sit on separate machines.
“This is the next step,” he said.
The business model works like co-location turned inside out. Instead of high-frequency firms renting rack space next to an exchange, the exchange and their trading logic share the same silicon, and that access is what PAX sells.
Stevenson is a former high-frequency trader. At Citadel Securities, he built ultra low-latency trading systems on FPGAs, the programmable chips traders use when speed is measured in billionths of a second. Before that, he served as a U.S. Navy officer on a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine.
He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford and a B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy. Two startups he worked at were acquired, HICAMP by Intel and Pixie by New Relic. He co-founded PAX with Chief Technology Officer Benjamin Kilimnik, a former New Relic engineer, and the company graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch.
In its launch post, PAX calls itself the first exchange in any capital market to run on a single chip rather than a datacenter, and claims a 30-nanosecond round trip where the fastest exchanges quote 30 microseconds. Those are the company’s figures, not independent benchmarks. Stevenson compares the model to Robinhood, free trades for everyone, with speed sold to the firms that want it most.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments are highly volatile and risky. Always conduct your own research before making any investment decisions.
If you follow our market coverage, don’t miss the Roundtable 100. Updated every Friday, it’s a power ranking of the 100 most investable tech stocks, including digital assets. Check out the latest RTB 100 rankings at roundtable100.com.
