Infrastructure
Is anyone a quant now? What LLMs do — and don't — change about crypto trading
LLMs didn't make anyone a quant. They removed the excuse for not being one.
I tested this myself recently. No coding background to speak of, no quant experience in any formal sense — just curiosity and a Claude subscription. Over a few evenings I ended up with something that worked: a data pipeline, a backtest, an execution layer wired into a CEX, basic risk monitoring. It wasn't pretty and it wasn't going to compete with anyone serious, but it ran. And it produced something that at least resembled signal. Eighteen months ago that would have taken me a team and six months. Now it took a weekend and a chat window. The math was never the bottleneck for most people trying to go pro. The scaffolding was. And the scaffolding is now free.
May 2026 · George Zarya