On a Tuesday morning in July, Asaf Meir sat before a congressional subcommittee and described a market that never sleeps. Hundreds of thousands of event contracts can be live at once. Human analysts work in shifts. Algorithms watch every order and trade, then mix those signals with identity records, news, social chatter and, when needed, blockchain trails. It sounded less like the tidy future promised by financial technology and more like air-traffic control during a meteor shower.
Meir had come to Washington to talk about sports-event prediction markets, where a contract might ask who wins, who scores, whether a match reaches penalties or whether one precise thing happens before halftime. Each question creates another tradable instrument. Each instrument is connected to the others. A person with privileged information can spread a position across the web and remain invisible to a system that watches one contract at a time.
This is exactly the sort of problem Meir has spent his career finding: a fast new market, a familiar human temptation and an old tool that no longer quite fits. His company, Solidus Labs, sells the upgraded tool. The work is technical, frequently regulatory and gloriously short of cocktail-party sparkle. It is also the plumbing under an industry that would prefer to discuss the penthouse.
The report on the trading floor
Meir grew up in Tel Aviv, completed mandatory military service, then arrived in the United States in 2010 to study computer science and economics at Brandeis University. The pairing was almost suspiciously neat. One discipline asks how systems behave. The other asks how people behave inside them, especially when money gives the answer a little shove.
He attended on a full scholarship, graduated magna cum laude in 2014 and received the computer science department’s Entrepreneur of the Year award. Along the way came startup work and an internship at Microsoft. Then Goldman Sachs hired him as an engineer on its equities trading desk, where structured derivatives and electronic trading turned his two majors into a daily practice.
Around 2017, a blockchain edition from Goldman’s research division crossed his desk. Meir is pleasantly unsentimental about the origin story. He was not buying pizza with Bitcoin in 2010. He learned about the technology at work, in a building governed by suits, protocols and agendas. Crypto arrived not as a rebellion but as a research problem.
“I’m not one of those people that traded bitcoin for pizza in 2010, definitely not. I learned about it on the trading floor.”Asaf Meir, on arriving late enough to ask boring questions
The boring questions were useful. If institutions eventually traded digital assets, how would they detect price manipulation? How would an exchange spot wash trading, when one party trades with itself to manufacture activity? What about spoofing, in which orders are placed to create a false impression and then withdrawn? Anti-money-laundering tools were receiving attention. Market abuse looked comparatively neglected.
Meir and former Goldman colleagues began sketching a trading workflow for blockchain-based assets. Vast sections were absent or badly underbuilt. They left to create Solidus Labs, choosing surveillance as the gap they could address now rather than waiting for every argument about crypto’s future to conclude. A blank canvas had appealed to Meir. His first instinct was to install boundaries around it.
A CEO title that felt borrowed
The company existed before Meir felt comfortable naming his place in it. During the research phase, with no product and no clients, saying “I’m the CEO” felt faintly fraudulent. Somebody eventually forced the words out of him. The response was instructive: his network woke up. Friends, former colleagues and distant acquaintances began introducing him to investors, operators and mentors.
A colleague gave the posture a name: “modacity,” or modest audacity. It is a rather good founder operating system. Humility keeps the questions honest; audacity makes them somebody else’s concern. Meir’s first-year lessons followed the same balance. Research before announcing. Then stop researching and build a lightweight proof of concept. Put it in front of a potential customer. Let raw feedback bruise the elegant theory.
He also urged founders to ask for help, share meaningful ownership with early contributors and trust the specialists they hire. The advice lacks the theatrical cruelty of startup folklore. There are no heroic all-nighters, only an insistence that learning should travel faster than ego. The company’s later product philosophy echoes that arrangement: software finds patterns, humans inspect the signal, and both improve through the encounter.
Tel Aviv to Brandeis, studying computer science and economics.
Graduation, then an engineering seat on Goldman’s equities desk.
A blockchain research report and the first Solidus thesis.
A $45 million Series B funds the surveillance buildout.
Congress calls to discuss integrity in prediction markets.
The bomb-sniffing dogs of crypto
By 2021, Meir described Solidus in canine terms: bomb-sniffing dogs for crypto markets. The company worked with exchanges, broker-dealers, over-the-counter desks, liquidity providers and regulators. Its detection library looked for price and volume manipulation across an ecosystem with more venues, more asset types and more ways to move between them than conventional systems expected.
The funding came in layers: a $20 million Series A, another $15 million strategic round and a $45 million Series B in 2022. Solidus says its technology now monitors more than a trillion events a day. The number is impressive mainly because the underlying problem is impolite enough to require it. Manipulation scales nicely. So must the machinery looking for it.
Meir’s public language remained consistent through crypto’s winters and scandals. Adoption requires guardrails. Compliance is not the decorative paperwork left until launch week. A venue that cannot earn trust eventually loses customers, counterparties or regulators. In his formulation, integrity infrastructure is the business.
When yes-or-no becomes complicated
Prediction markets push that thesis into peculiar territory. Their prices are bounded between zero and one dollar. A move from three cents to four is a 33 percent jump but may mean little in cash. A move from 80 cents to 90 can matter greatly on a large position. Percentage rules designed for other markets can scream at noise and sleep through consequence.
The contracts are also disposable. They appear for an election, a match or an announcement, then resolve and vanish. There may be no long price history, standard identifier or reference set. Closely related outcomes can number in the dozens. On blockchain-based venues, one actor may control several wallets while money moves onchain, orders match elsewhere and profits return through another route.
Meir’s testimony did not pretend software dissolves these problems. Detection models generate alerts; people triage them. Most turn out to be ordinary trading, legitimate news or natural volatility. A small number become investigations. Evidence must be assembled, documented and, when warranted, referred to an exchange, regulator, league or law-enforcement agency. The machine supplies reach. The human supplies judgment and accountability.
“Integrity infrastructure is not a cost center of the business. It is the business.”Asaf Meir, congressional testimony, July 2026
That balance also explains Solidus’ move into agentic compliance, introduced in 2025. Its AI agents are meant to enrich signals, prioritize alerts, assist investigations and prepare case materials while people remain in the loop. The ambition is practical: analysts should spend less time clearing repetitive low-risk alerts and more time understanding the cases that refuse easy answers.
There is a pleasing symmetry to Meir’s route. Computer science gave him the instinct to map systems. Economics supplied incentives. Goldman showed him the rituals that make institutional markets function. Crypto broke enough of those rituals to create a company. Prediction markets now break another set.
Freedom, with someone watching the gauges
Sixteen years after arriving in America as an international student, and two years after becoming a citizen, Meir described himself to Congress as an engineer rather than a lawyer or policymaker. He spoke of raising two daughters, with a son on the way, and connected his immigrant story to the capital markets that helped make the country an engine of opportunity. Innovation, in his view, works when freedom and sensible guardrails arrive together.
Away from the market map, his official biography offers two details that improve the portrait: he supports guide-dog training and plays drums. Both reward timing, patience and the ability to notice a signal before it becomes an instruction. One should resist making a philosophy from every hobby, but this one has suspiciously good rhythm.
The aspiration behind Solidus is broader than catching a dishonest trader. Meir wants digital assets and onchain markets to make finance more transparent, efficient and accessible. He also believes that promise fails if ordinary participants cannot trust the venue. The guardrail is therefore not the enemy of the road. It is what lets more people take the trip.
Crypto’s first era celebrated invention at any speed. The next is asking who checks the wiring. Meir has been answering for nine years: engineers, investigators and institutions, working together, before the smoke becomes the story.