# Proper: On-Chain Prop Trading and AI Agent Integration

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-09-22

## Transcript

I actually think that prop trading for agents has a much better market fit than prop trading for humans.
The digital asset industry has brought an entirely new generation of financial primitives to the market.
Prop trading is one of them, but what is prop trading?
Why is it exploding?
And what do you need to know about all of this?
Hello and welcome to Milk Road Crypto, the show that knows that between props, perps, and prediction markets, there are a lot of fun ways to go broke in crypto.
I'm your host, John Gillen.
Today is Tuesday, September 22nd, and today we are joined by Louis Regis.
Louis is the founder and CEO of Proper, an on-chain prop trading firm built on Hyperliquid.
I'm really excited to talk to him about prop trading.
I know almost nothing about it, but I know he's an expert and I know he knows a lot about the Hyperliquid ecosystem too.
So if all that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
And as a reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our partners at Nexo, the digital asset platform that lets you trade, earn, and borrow all in one place.
So keep an ear out for more information on them later in the episode.
episode.
But for now, let's welcome to the Milk Road show, Louis.
How are you?
Hey, John.
Doing super good.
Market is up.
The mood is up in crypto overall.
And really excited today to talk about Prop Trading and PropR specifically.
Well, I'm really excited to have you.
I think we're going to learn a lot in this one.
For those who maybe aren't familiar with PropR and with Prop Trading, could you just give us a high-level overview of what this platform is and how Prop Trading works?
To come back to the fundamentals of prop trading, it's the ability for a young trader to access more capital without leverage.
So the way it works is you buy a test.
So you take a test.
The test has simple rules like a max drawdown limits and AD loss, and then you have to hit the profit target.
And if you pass this test, you'll get access to all capital.
So it's an easy way for retail investors that do not necessarily have access to a lot of capital to get a lot more size in the market in a way that's pretty seamless.
For example, you can get access to up to 200k of capital to give an idea of the price.
For example, 100k of capital, you can pay north of like $500 to get access to this capital.
So it's a different way to access leverage as a retail investors and grow your capital.
And what we do specifically is we build this on-chain.
So it's built on top of hyperliquid, super transparent.
It sort of all responds to this industry that today is super opaque.
And hyperliquid, the on-chain world, brings a ton of transparency to the space.
And we've seen great traction and great feedback from our users so far.
How do you think about the ideal user group for this?
Because prop trading traditionally has been something that has been done by a lot of institutions like Jane Street and so forth.
Why do you think prop trading needs to be something that's more accessible to retail and who are the ideal users for this?
Yeah, we'd say someone that has found an edge on the market.
So it's really good in the market, but does not have sufficient capital to scale.
So I would say...
ideal customer would be someone that has a net worth from a thousand dollars to a hundred care and wants to grow their stack more rapidly.
So it's, it's a way to decouple your capital.
I would recommend prop shooting to only traders that know how to trade.
I actually do not think that you should start with, with prop shooting.
I think once you have an edge on the markets, maybe you've traded on, on paper money in the past.
There's really a way to go.
No, from let's say 1k of capital to 100k, and then you can trade on your own.
But it's really the ability to democratize access to external capital to retail investors, which, as you said in the past, was only available to institutionals.
So tell me about this.
You've said in the past that the technology is no longer the moat anymore and that anybody could build a prop firm.
How do you think about...
proper in terms of like protecting its moat and like the unique value proposition of proper as opposed to somebody else building their own prop trading system?
Yeah, we think one transparency is becoming more and more important.
Transparency brings you proximity between your users and the platform.
So for example, it's to be open and transparent about actually any metric about the business, for example, and proper.
you can view our financial statements in real time so you see how sound the platform is and we are trying to be transparent on all levels and for example i also do daily streams on the progress of proper day after then we think that this is something that's hard to replicate because not all firms are willing to go the extra mile in terms of transparency so that's uh i guess that's our number one uh what number two is the distribution so today you can act have access to on-chain capital through proper, like proper.xyz, but you can also have access to our infrastructure through other apps.
We've announced a partnership with MMT.gg.
It's a trading terminal.
And just like you can trade on hyperliquid through MMT.gg, today you can also trade on proper.
So we are scaling proper through other terminals too that already have an existing distribution, and that's hard to replicate.
So today we are in just a few terminals, but by the end of the year, we'll be on over about 15 terminals.
And that's really going to build a moat for us.
And that's, I would say, today the two big moats that we have.
We're working towards a third one, which will include a lot of social components.
And whenever you have, I guess, let's say a social network that's embedded within the firm, then that's value that's hard to create on a different pilot.
because that's like external knowledge.
And that's going to be our third month, which will be live in Q4 this year.
Hi everyone, this is John.
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Okay, so there's some helpful context on how you're thinking about the differentiation of proper and sort of building a moat around the business.
I'm kind of curious about the Hyperliquid angle on this.
And your background is pretty interesting.
You were a quant at Credit Suisse, and you were running Rothschild's Cryptodesk, I believe.
And then you were one of the earliest traders to come to Hyperliquid.
Talk to me about the Hyperliquid ecosystem and why you think Hyperliquid is maybe uniquely well-suited to build an on-chain prop trading firm.
and just talk to me about that and what was the attraction there.
Yeah, so what you want, if you want to be very transparent, you want to build on, we're essentially as transparent as the underlying, you know, same process as in the L2.
On Ethereum, like you inherit the security properties of Ethereum and that's the same for us.
So for example, if you were to be built on Bybit or Binance, you don't have access to liquidation data for example on Binance or Bybit or you cannot really trust them.
So Hyperliquid provides this provides this open ledger for trades and that we think is very very important.
Second is also the trading UX is great.
Some of the biggest traders in the space trade on Hyperliquid and they trade on Hyperliquid for a reason.
It's because you have free low spreads, high liquidity, high amount of open interest on various amount of tokens and they also have a pretty wide asset universe for HIP3 and now they're rolling HIP4 too.
So just very convenient as a platform and today there is little reason to use Binance Parps over to Hyperliquid.
And I think third and that's going to be my last point is regulatory arbitrage.
So Hyperliquid has grown because of this regulatory arbitrage essentially being able to move persons through the tokenized perks area because they are not regulated and so they do not have to to get licenses etc and so they are being very agile and that's something that we like so that we can also have an edge to on the on the market and it's also a platform that today does not enforce kyc so we can support as many users as possible whereas platforms like okx or or diabetes you know are have licenses etc um so we cannot necessarily use their data for all of our customers hyperliquid right now is trading just a little bit under a hundred dollars token with nearly a 24 billion dollar market cap a lot of people have been paying attention to this project and i'm curious your thoughts on how big the addressable market for hyperliquid is because perpetuals, you know, have been around for a very long time, but only very recently started to gain some traction.
And now they seem to be eating into a lot of the spot markets and other things.
How big do you see the addressable markets for perps and you know, for an ecosystem like hyperliquid being and like, what's your perspective on that as somebody who's, you know, been in trading for his whole career?
Yeah, I think hyperliquid has really grown as a regulatory arbitrage.
Typically, As a French, I got kicked off by Bits in August 2024 or July 2024.
And so I was forced, because I wanted to trade PURPS, I was actually forced to trade on hyperliquid.
So hyperliquid has grown because of this regulatory arbitrage.
And my fear about hyperliquid is that regulation will come into this space, which will bring hyperliquid on part to the to the other platforms.
Because, for example, today there is no, I think you have innovation exemptions around perks, but the day you have regulatory frameworks, then that means there will be an even playing field between the larger actors and hyperliquid.
But it's hard to assess exactly what's going to be the growth of hyperliquids once the Kraken of the world, Binance of the world, are able to be on the same playing field.
But I would like to say that the way it's shaping up, hyperliquid today does not capture roughly any institutional flows because institutionals do not want to capture this regulatory arbitrage.
And I think this is the big next step for hyperliquid.
For example, today on the perps, you do not have the traditional market makers, the gen streets of the world, that are all being on HIP3.
And that's, I think, the next big step for hyperliquid.
And then, for example, having a framework to enter the US will be, I would say, an order of magnitude in terms of, if we look at the open interest, daily volume, we think we're looking at an order of magnitude growth from here.
Now, in terms of valuation, I would say today you really have to view like hyperliquid at like 95 is really just a venture bet.
I think it just surpassed inter-entry brokers in terms of valuation, if I'm not wrong.
So you have to be betting that Hyperliquid will somewhat be tackling CME for like price discovery, for example, and will eat their market share, which I think is a play that will unfold maybe in the next two or three years.
But that's my take on Hyperliquid at the moment.
I think price-wise, it's surely fairly priced.
There are some headwins eventually, I think.
Airdrops, for example, season three might come out soon.
And I think it's going to be some overhang for the token at some point.
Okay, so what's your strategy at proper then?
Like, let's say that this regulatory arbitrage that's given Hyperliquid sort of a niche and sort of a moat and an advantage in certain ways in the market here.
If that starts to go away, do you think proper stays in the Hyperliquid ecosystem?
Do you think you maybe migrate somewhere else?
Or like, how does that impact you?
Are you sort of agnostic to that?
What we want is to, as I said, we inherit the properties of the infra that we build on top of.
And what we want is this is open by nature.
And today, there are only so few platforms like Glitter, Hyperliquid.
Then there's a trade-off between liquidity and centralization and transparency.
So let's say if Binance Perps were to be 10x more liquid, maybe we would look at Binance Perps.
But today, we really value transparency.
um for example on how we handle traders positions well that's managed on hyperliquid and i think our users really like this so overall as a trader i want to get the best spread best equity on all the assets that we build that we list but i would say it's only going to be relevant really if finance perhaps has like spread that's like 3x more efficient um before this I would not really look at this.
So we'll go for decentralized infra and stick to it.
Realistically, if we go out of decentralized infra, proper is going to lose part of the ethos that makes proper unique to that.
I'm glad to hear that's important to you.
I think that that does matter a lot.
I want to ask your thoughts about sort of where this goes from here in terms of adoption and users.
As we said, prop trading traditionally has been something that has been engaged in by institutions.
You're trying to make it on-chain, decentralized infrastructure and retail oriented.
But a lot of people are talking about agentic finance and AI agents beginning to engage in a lot of these crypto primitives.
Does Propr have a strategy or a thought around how to adapt the product in the world where AI agents may eventually become the primary users.
Yeah, we actually built proper initially for agents.
So the whole infrastructure has been built around an API initially.
And then we've added the front end on top of this.
Today, about a third of our users are agents or algo traders.
It's one of the...
thing that benefits proper the most is today all the old prop firms are built on some of white label technology that do not have access to external APIs or do not have an open API for agents to trade.
And today we have this toolkit that makes it easy for bots, trades or platforms to integrate.
I actually think that prop trading for agents has a much better market fit than prop trading for humans.
The reason is trust issues between your aggros and your capital.
Put simply, you do not want to risk a 100K of your capital with a bot or an agent, but you're happy to give it a test that you're going to pay $500 and then eventually get him to trade 100K.
So that's a common payment for agro traders and prop training to solve this.
And that's why today is the segment of proper that has grown the most.
Can you talk me through a little bit about what your vision of that future looks like?
Like you said, like 30% of the traffic today is bots or agents.
If that number 30% rises to 95, 99%, do you think that's the direction of travel here that humans will begin to turn over trading to agents?
And then what does that look like?
Am I just like, you know, giving my wallet to an agent and it's using this infrastructure and I never touch it?
Like what's that world look like in your mind?
Oh, I think when I also did some wealth managements in the past.
And when you had this 40, 60 portfolio in the past, being exposed to bonds and stocks, I think this is going to shift to applications that's going to be driven by humans and applications that's going to be driven by bots and agents.
So I think in the next 10 years, you'll view your portfolio as how much of it is controlled by agents and how much of it is controlled by bots, like agents and humans.
i don't think maybe it's going to be on par maybe 50 50.
i still do think that you might as well play a big role in uh capital allocation um specifically for trading because trading is also an ego game like people trade because they want to be right so like feel like they can be right and beat the markets whereas uh just putting money in a bot just hits very different as a as a trader and i i do feel like it's going to be hard for you to be confident about your about to be able to perform over time whereas if you have an edge as a personal trader you know your edge can persist over time or at least you have an ability to adapt so my view is you'll see your portfolio over time as a portfolio of human decisions and then asian decisions um but then i don't see it evolve more than uh 50 even when we talk about private wealth management for the or like family offices What you want is some kind of accountability.
And the issue is who is going to justify your drawdown, how much do you trust, frontier model.
Will you put the blame on an agent?
Not so much.
And when it comes to big trades, you basically want to have someone accountable.
And I don't feel like you can bring agents to that level today.
Okay, I want to get your thoughts on prediction markets because my understanding of this, and you'll have to fill in some details for me, but it looks to me like you're trying to expand into prediction markets next and offering accounts to humans and AI agents.
But it seems like from a lot of the recent benchmarks and trials that I've seen that AI agents haven't yet, as far as I know, exhibited any kind of advantage in the prediction market space yet.
And I'm curious if you think that trend holds, or do you think over time, AI agents are going to get to a point where they are much, much better than human beings at prediction markets?
And I'm just kind of interested to hear your strategy on prediction markets overall.
If we transpose the behavior of bots and agents versus humans on a platform, they tend to upperform humans today.
Our pass rate agents is close to 20% and humans is 16%.
So it's about how many...
evaluation surpass.
And we think that's a notable step up.
And we think this is going to transpose to prediction markets too, because to be good at prop trading, you have to be good at risk management.
And that's typically where, as a human, ego comes into the equation, where, for example, you have a stop loss at a given level, and you're like, well, I'm going to give it some buffer.
I don't want to take the loss.
Whereas an agent is viewing risk management.
with no emotion.
So having no emotion in prompting is actually very positive.
So I think just based on this, pass rate is going to be better.
And I think there are strong arguments to be made that for prediction markets, people that have access to tons of data, so agents or LLM, could find some kind of edge on the markets.
Or if you're talking about very sophisticated agents, do some arbitrage between markets.
Those prediction markets...
listings are very liquid and still very nascent.
So that's typically when you have the most amount of innovation at a bot level.
I do think we'll see similar things transposed, like higher pass rate, bigger payouts, much better risk management on the bot, but that's yet to be seen.
We actually don't have an ETF or pretty market launch.
We were meant to launch this about a quarter ago at this stage, but we really wanted to focus on perks.
Yeah, I think like end of October is probably when we go live with Dash.
You know, one of the weird things about crypto is that the longer you're in it, the more accounts you seem to end up with.
You buy in one place, trade somewhere else, earn yield somewhere else.
And if you actually need capital, you end up having to sell something that you probably wanted to keep.
That's why we at Milk Road are partnering with Nexo.
These guys keep the whole thing under one account.
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All in one spot, all in one account, all on Nexo.
So if you need liquidity, but you don't want to give up your position, or you're already holding crypto and you want to be able to do more with it, I think Nexo is worth your time.
We love working with them.
I think you will too.
Tell them Milk Road sent you.
Okay, so I think the question I have here is just around all these different financial primitives that have come to market.
Like, as you said, you're seeing what you consider a significant outperformance from the agents versus the humans on perps.
And you think that will hold for prediction markets.
Do you think that if we gave agents more options trading options, for example, and access to those kinds of derivatives that they would continue to outperform across like all of these things?
Or do you think that there are certain derivatives or products that will be more popular in the future versus others?
Because like right now, human beings use these all for different use cases.
and they all have different pros and cons.
And I'm curious your view on what that evolving landscape looks like as we see more AI agents start to engage with these products.
Yeah, you have a lot of adgrows that are today on zero DTE options, and they tend to do quite well there.
I'm not like an options pro, but zero DTE options is where, you know, the zero day expiry options is where I think they can have an edge.
But where I see the...
I guess the best edge today and that's where I have the most amount of data is in prompting mostly because of how well defined the risk management is.
You can argue that options are the same because you pay the premium and that's you know in like simple options that's what you lose but that's that's really it.
I don't think like bots can essentially be better on all market because they got access to a lot more data and I think given enough time and you know enough backtest they can extract some kind of edge on the market.
The issue you'll have is any edge that you have in the market erodes over time.
Like something that worked for a year is not going to work next year because like edge is gapped.
And the issue you'll find is that most of the edge today in traditional markets are found in hardware.
So it's basically latency that you have.
you know how fast can you be on the market so i think intuitively that bots will have an easier time on the adequate markets and markets where you do not have many participants and typically like prediction markets for example you have a ton of arbitrage opportunity between like the top four or five prediction markets and if you don't have like an insane amount of capital you can grow your equity quite fast in those markets and i actually did it in 2024 on um on pretty markets Well, congratulations on doing that.
I want to bring the conversation back to proper, but thank you for your thoughts on that.
I think all of this is fascinating, and it's interesting to hear somebody who spent his whole career in trading talk about how.
how that changes with AI agents.
There was a planned token generation event for a token called Proper for the Proper ecosystem that's been pushed back.
And to my understanding, you're trying to target a $5 million treasury reserve and five new integrations now before you go forward with the token generation event.
Could you just talk through for me a little bit about the plans here, what happened, why the delay, and what the progress is on this now?
Yeah, so, I mean, Popper overall has been an insanely fast-growing journey.
We've launched about five months ago, 3.7 or 3.8 million revenue.
If you annualize that, that's about 16 million of revenue a year.
Probably the second biggest crypto platform in the on-chain world, we have like 70% market share.
So we're trying to navigate the fields.
um in a way that's pretty agile and so things change and they change for a reason and we're also learning a lot about the market you've discussed about the moats of the firm what's key is that whenever you launch a token i.e like a lot more people have access to the upside of the company that you're solid enough so that your moats persist over time the risky thing to do is to launch token but that's but then do not have a moat over time.
And I did say distribution is our moat, but you want to have a guarantee on this.
For example, as I said, by end of year, we should have about 15 integration.
And that to me is sufficient to build a moat around our distribution.
Because for example, if we have 15 integration, that means the incremental integration like N plus one is going to be much easier because you have the track record of working with the best terminals and brands in the crypto space.
The second aspect is how much cash we have in reserve.
Today, proper has been bootstrapped essentially from day one.
We've received very little actual funding, but we think that having a strong balance sheet is a moat.
For example, like a 5 million balance sheet or like 5 million cash is going to enable us to play around with our numbers, change the pricing, try to innovate a lot more.
Today, Breakout is number one.
Let's say we want to go after breakouts, then we might want to take on more risks about our economics.
And if you don't have a sufficient cash buffer, then you're pretty much stuck.
In terms of capital markets, it's much harder to raise capital once you have a token that's launched.
So you want to be very strategic about the most of the firm.
And that's why we have those two metrics.
So we're doing it so that the firm is major enough to kick our flywheels whenever we have a token that's launched.
So it sounds like you're trying to build a robust and sustainable business before you launch your token, which is a wild idea in crypto.
So I commend you for that.
Do you think that that year-end target for some of these metrics that you're shooting for is realistic?
Or is that kind of like a guess or an estimate?
How firm is that target in your mind?
The 5 million we have 1.3 million, I think, to date.
We're raising around about 2.5 million.
Pretty much 100% of the proceeds go into that reserve.
So to me, it's about in a quarter's time, how much EBITDA, so how much excess cash can we earn from the business?
We think that we can have in excess cash over the quarter about $1.5 million.
And so if we raise the $2.5 million, we get excess cash of $1.5 million for the quarter.
Then that amounts to about $4 million.
Today we have about $1.3 million in excess cash.
that adds up to your five million targets.
And on the integration side, that's pretty much our whole pipeline is 15 clients.
And we already have enough integration schedule for a year-end to account for the five.
So we think this is going to happen.
Now, there's a world where it doesn't.
It would mean that something is going wrong on the, potentially we took on quite some risks on, like we compressed our margin, which we don't expect is going to happen through the next three quarters.
Or that means that we're trying to raise less, which is not in the current plan.
So that means we do not intend to raise, which is also not in the plans.
But as with everything, there are things that might change.
Maybe someone's going to come in, we'll have to be aggressive and reduce our cash reserve.
But I think we're pretty firm on our target for Iran.
And in fact, we think that we're going to reach this point earlier.
Another goal that you've set for yourself is reaching a revenue target of $10 million.
And you have been posting or live streaming every single day as you progress towards that goal, which is, I think, very commendable and very public.
So good for you for doing that.
Talk to me through the decision to publicly, you know, like, I guess, like, journal about this journey towards this $10 million target and how far are you on that progression now?
Yeah, when I first started proper, on-chain training was nothing.
It was not even a term.
And I said, okay, we're going to go all in.
I gave myself essentially 18 months.
I said, okay, a year and a half, I go all in.
And let's see how far I can go.
And I was just at my desk and I thought, I'm not typically not the guy to be comfortable on camera but i thought you know how cool would that be to to journal proper day day one to 10 million revenue 10 million of revenue is not super relevant like as in it's not like a crazy crazy target but i thought okay it'd be it'd be nice um and i think it's challenging enough so i had this thought and i remember it was mid-february i said like Less than 30 minutes after I said, okay, let's do the first stream.
So we can watch the first stream and look at how unprofessional that was.
Still very unprofessional, but just to me, just like you trade, like when you trade, sometimes people post on Next to journal their trades.
And to me, it's a way in which I communicate about how I build proper.
And also fundamentally, the prop chain today is broken.
It's hard to trust prop firms because they're opaque.
the band user, you don't know anything about their financials.
And I thought, okay, just why not have the founder just show what it's like.
And you'll see I'm not going to run away.
I'm actually here almost every single day on stream.
So if you have questions, and I think having this proximity to the team is super beneficial to users.
It's also not something that a lot of people are willing to do.
Like, you might see a ton of new firms coming up.
But find me another firm that does like daily streams.
It's going to be super hard though, let alone just a founder that's being open and public about what they build.
Louis, this is one of the reasons why I was so excited to talk to you.
I think that your vision, your commitments are exceptional, but your passion and transparency and those values are really important to you and to your project as well, which stands out a lot to me.
So I wish you the best with all of this and I hope we can catch up again with more of this.
Where can we send our audience to find more of you and your work online if they want to follow along with this journey?
Yeah, proper XYZ.
So proper.xyz is the website.
My X account is Louis Regis, so just no space.
And then the proper account on X is proper XYZ.
And I'm on X, so I'm streaming on X.
I'm also streaming on Twitch and YouTube.
So we can, I guess, just find the links on my social and eventually go on stream and then watch the whole journey and eventually get to trade with us.
Well, I'm excited to see where the journey leads from here.
Louis Regis, thank you so much for being on the Milk Road Show.
Thanks so much, John.
And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
This is a fun one.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of Milk Road Crypto.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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