An independent research firm, named for a valley that doesn't appear on most maps.
Gerrehbenta Finance exists to understand the technologies rebuilding finance and computation — early, deeply, and in public.
The firm sits deliberately between two worlds. Investment research is rigorous about money and credulous about technology; technical research is rigorous about systems and silent about economics. We hold both standards at once. Our analysts read protocols the way credit analysts read covenants, and we model markets the way engineers model failure.
We are independent in the strict sense: our research program answers to no outside capital, accepts no sponsorship, and publishes its mistakes alongside its calls. Everything we put our name on is meant to be checkable.
Our method borrows from field surveying. A surveyor doesn't predict the terrain; they walk it, measure it, and draw contour lines others can navigate by. We do the same with frontier technology: run the systems, read the source, replay the data, interview the builders — then publish the map.
We commit to territories, not headlines. Each of our six research quadrants is a multi-year program, followed through hype cycles and winters alike. Most of our coverage begins two to five years before a category has a name, which means most of it looks obscure when it ships and obvious in retrospect. That gap is the entire value of the work.
Core principles
Primary sources or nothing
We cite code, papers, filings, and on-chain data. If a claim can't be traced to something we ran, measured, or proved, it doesn't appear in our work.
Build to understand
Reference implementations are part of the research method. A system we can't reproduce is a system we don't claim to understand.
Publish the retractions
Every annual survey lists the theses we retired and why. Being checkably wrong in public is the price of being credible.
Privacy is a load-bearing value
We study privacy-preserving systems because we believe in them. The firm runs on the architectures it covers: local-first tooling, end-to-end encryption, minimal data retention.
The survey team
JOIN THE TEAM →Mara Gerber
FOUNDER & HEAD OF RESEARCH
EX–PROTOCOL ENGINEERING · DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
Tunde Okafor
MARKETS · DeFi MICROSTRUCTURE
EX–RATES TRADING
Lena Vasquez
CRYPTOGRAPHY · TEEs & FHE
APPLIED CRYPTOGRAPHER
Daniel Kim
SOFTWARE · LOCAL-FIRST & SYNC
REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATIONS