In 2010, two Stanford graduates named Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt founded Chronos Research LLC at 316 High Street, Palo Alto. Their mission was to give high-frequency trading firms something they had never had access to before: a complete, affordable, sub-5 microsecond algorithmic trading platform called Zardoz.

For nearly three years they built and refined it — a 64-core Tilera-based execution engine, a back-testing environment, a compliance suite, pre-trade risk filters, and co-location through CFN Services. Zardoz was technically ahead of its time.

Then in May 2013, Vlad made the call to shut it all down. Not because it failed — but because he and Baiju had seen a larger injustice: everyday people were paying $7–$10 per stock trade while Wall Street traded for fractions of a cent. They chose to fix that instead. Chronos Research closed. Robinhood was born.

The website went dark. The platform was never released publicly. What Vlad built was lost — until now.