What we build, and how to check it.

Solace is an independent research company building instruments for decision-making under uncertainty. The operating belief is narrow and testable: individual events resist prediction, but the structure around them — liquidity, timing, regime, probability — can be read, modeled, and acted on with discipline.

Solace begins with markets because markets compress feedback. They expose timing, uncertainty, and system quality in days rather than years, and they fund the work. Every instrument follows one loop: observe, model, simulate, deploy — and keep only what survives contact with the world.

Two instruments operate today. Hermes reads market structure and acts on it. The Oracle holds questions about real events open and weighs futures until the world resolves them. They share one discipline: signal must earn action, and most of the time the correct action is none.

Both instruments log their decisions as they are made. Nothing in the record is written retroactively.

Hermes is a live system that reads liquidity distribution, timing, and regime character across multiple timeframes. Its core abstraction is the liquidity path: the premise that a price destination matters less than whether the field between here and there can carry price. Hermes evaluates candidate paths and commits only when structure, timing, and regime agree.

Execution is gated, not continuous. A dedicated decision engine sits between signal and order, enforcing entry conditions, position sizing, stop placement, and portfolio constraints. When the regime breaks character, Hermes changes posture or stands down entirely.

This brief deliberately describes Hermes at the level of architecture, not features. The specific signals, parameters, and models are the work, and they are not published.

The Oracle is a probability engine over event markets, beginning with exchange-listed target markets on crypto assets. For each open question it builds an order-book view, produces a probability estimate, and records that estimate before resolution.

Calibration is the product. Every prediction is scored against the resolved outcome (Brier scoring machinery already runs inside the system), and the score is the Oracle’s only honest résumé. The Oracle is currently calibrating. The interim record (every resolved question, scored, misses included) is published as it stands on the public calibration page, labeled as a young sample; headline calibration claims wait until the resolved sample is large enough to mean something.

Hermes currently allocates founder capital only: no outside capital is at risk while access opens in stages. As approved users come online, they fund Hermes by depositing capital directly into Solace through the account dashboard: deposits are recorded to the user’s Solace account, pass through settlement and treasury controls, and become eligible for Hermes allocation only after onboarding, identity, and risk checks are complete.

Risk is governed in layers: posture (how boldly capital is routed, from preservation to velocity), sizing that scales with field depth, hard drawdown guards, and kill switches that halt the system entirely. Money movement stays separate from signal generation: deposits, withdrawals, account value, and available balance remain visible through Solace account rails. Standing down is treated as a position, and the system takes it often.

A system that manages capital should be checkable by the people who trust it. Solace commits to the following, in order of arrival:

The standard is simple: claims that can be checked, published when they can be checked. Anything not yet checkable is labeled with its honest status. That includes this founder’s track record, which does not yet exist in a form worth calling a track record; Hermes and the Oracle are the mechanism by which it will.

Everything in this brief describes what Solace does now. This section describes what it’s for, stated at a distance, on purpose.

The instruments Solace builds are not specific to financial markets. Hermes reads structure, timing, and regime to decide when a system should act and when it should stand down. Markets are where that loop is tested first, because they compress feedback into days instead of years and because they fund the work. The longer aim is instruments that make the same kind of disciplined, checkable decisions in systems beyond finance: wherever timing, resource allocation, and uncertainty matter and outcomes can be verified against reality. This is a multi-year horizon, named now so the gate conditions below have a destination, not a near-term roadmap item.

Domains are earned, not declared. Expansion beyond markets is gated on the conditions below, and this board is the public record of their status. Each gate is defined so it can be checked, not just claimed:

Until every gate clears, Solace is a markets company. That’s not a hedge; it’s the actual current scope.

This document describes systems under active development. It is not an offer of advisory services, not investment advice, and contains no performance claims. Access to any Solace instrument is subject to eligibility and applicable regulation. This brief is versioned; later versions supersede earlier ones, and the version history will remain public.