Nick Preszler

I was born in Fargo, ND, and grew up in Newtown, CT.

From a young age, I developed a deep interest in financial markets. I began trading at 15 and learned to code through that process, expanding my focus from picking individual stocks to running quantitative strategies on commodities and eventually crypto. My first exposure to crypto came through trading: I wanted to put real money on the line but was too young to open a brokerage account. So I started by using a VPN to access BitMex, running strategies on a Chromebook in my bedroom closet.

Driven by a desire to better understand businesses and markets, I landed my first internship in high school at a marketing agency in my hometown. In university, I analyzed companies for a search fund, then interned as an ETF portfolio management analyst at Invesco, and later joined the Index Delta desk at SIG.

Throughout university, I continued trading and building companies. I started with a commodities and crypto fund, testing ideas in the market until NodeKit, my first company, emerged. I dropped out at 20 years old to participate in a16z's CSX to build the multi-chain blockbuilding infrastructure company.

Today, I am a cofounder and COO of Melee Markets where I lead research and mechanism design. Melee Markets is a permissionless prediction market that allows the world to price any objective or subjective truth using the Parimutuel Market Maker (PMM), our novel event pricing mechanism.

I enjoy watchmaking and weightlifting, and believe deeply in the power of compounding.