Starting July 18, we’re hosting THREE startup and builder meetups during the one week of the year when the whole ecosystem converges. Founders, operators, and investors visiting from everywhere, all in the same city at the same time.

This is simply the biggest week in Chicago tech, full stop.

I'll be giving you an inside look at what we're building and why. If you're a founder, operator, or investor, you'll want to be there.

Make sure to mark your calendars now.

In 1848, 25 Chicago grain merchants got tired of chaotic, unorganized markets and did something about it. They founded the Chicago Board of Trade, the first grain futures exchange in the United States.

Chicago had just become the hub connecting Midwestern producers to East Coast population centers via the railroads and those merchants standardized how contracts worked so farmers could lock in prices before harvest and buyers could plan ahead.

It was a simple idea that changed global finance.

Today, CME Group, born from that original grain exchange, is the largest futures exchange in the world by both trading volume and notional value, offering products across interest rates, equity indexes, forex, energy, agricultural commodities, and metals.

In 2025, CME hit a record average daily volume of 28.1 million contracts, up 6% year over year. At peak sessions, notional value in equity index futures alone exceeded $300B in a single day.

Chicago didn't just invent the trade. It became the infrastructure for how the world prices risk.

And now it's happening again.

Last week I was on a panel for World Product Day alongside teams from Coinflow and Capital One, talking about Chicago's role in building the financial infrastructure layer for what comes next. The actual rails.

The city that built the futures contract is now building real-time settlement. CME's crypto derivatives hit $12B in average daily notional value in 2025, a 139% jump year over year, and CME just launched 24/7 crypto trading in 2026 to meet institutional demand.

Meanwhile, there are Chicago startups moving money in 5 seconds at a fraction of the cost of legacy rails. Settlement layers running underneath some of the biggest crypto platforms in the world. Fintechs ripping out interchange entirely. And companies that have been quietly defining how retail investors and institutions understand markets for decades. They're all here.

What struck me most on that panel was how little credit Chicago gives itself for what's already here. We invented the trade. We're building what comes after it. The question is whether we're telling the story loud enough.

We're not. But that's changing. More on this from me next week 👀

OneTwoLoop is a platform that connects Chicago's best engineers with the city's most promising startups.

Not through job boards. Through community. Vetted engineers engage with companies they actually care about, and startups and companies get access to talent they'd never find through a LinkedIn post.

Engineers who understand product, taste, speed, and execution.

In just 50 days: NINE engineers have now landed full-time roles through OneTwoLoop.

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