At the end of March, I covered Polychain Capital which caught my attention since Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures funded them with $10million. In Polychain Capital: A hedge fund investing at the Protocol layer of Web 3.0, I started with the motto: “Today is the slowest day of the rest of our lives”, and just 4 months later Polychain Capital is proof of accelerated growth. They have already accumulated already $200mil in assets under management.
Over the past year, despite the stricter regulatory pre-positioning towards the crypto world (digital “currencies” or “assets” and tokens) in the US, the growth of dedicated hedge funds aiming to capture the boom is stunning. In early July Forbes reported Crypto Boom: 15 New Hedge Funds Want In On 84,000% Returns
“43 projects raised $1.2 billion in initial coin offerings since May 1, according to Nick Tomaino’s The Control, and with stratospheric returns for so many ICOs — 82,000% for Ethereum, 56,000% for IOTA, 44,000% for Stratis, 21,000% for Spectrecoin” excerpt from Forbes.
There is clearly a summer boom in investment vehicles that are only suitable for accredited investors in the US and are deployed a variety of strategies to gain exposure in the booming space.
“From July 1, 2016, the value of bitcoin rallied from $680 inch-close to the $3,000 mark in mid-June and is now trading around the $2,650 mark. This impressive 12-month rally caught the attention of institutional investors who want their piece of the pie in this new high-performing asset class.” excerpt from “How Big Money Investors Will Boost the Price of Bitcoin“
There are some investment vehciles taking the buy-and-hold Buffet style approach, that end up in retirement accounts. There are others that are closer to the approach of futures and commodities trading, and could end up in the “alternative” allocation of HNW portfolios, since the 90s alternatives can’t promise anything close to the spectacular returns of the crypto asset class.
There is a mesh of digital currencies of sorts of capitalizations and of tokens of all kinds (utility, or equity or hybrid). And more recently, there are investment companies that are issuing or plan to issue their own token (ICO) that gives exposure and liquidity to various of their fund vehicles.
This is my categorization of the US crypto hedge fund space right now. If I have missed any hedge fund and if the strategy changes in the future, please let us know in the commentary below.
US crypto hedge fund space – more details
Mestable Capital was founded by Lucas Ryan, Josh Seims and Naval Ravikant, the chief executive officer and cofounder of Angel List, in late 2014 and has $45 million in assets under management.
Crypto Assets Fund (CAF) invests in bitcoin, ether, zcash, ripple, litecoin and dash. It is the first fund focused on Latin American family offices and is co-founded by former senior manager at Bain, Roberto Ponce Romay. The first tranche has raised $10mil and aims to grow to $50m.
The BKCM Digital Asset Fund is an investment fund for institutional clients that so far has invested in bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, ripple and Zcash, among others. It strategy is hybrid: Buy-and-hold for about 50% of the tokens, ICOs for 20% and actively managed for the remaining. Investments consist of foundational protocol tokens such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, currencies such as Litecoin, XRP, Zcash and Stellar, plus tokens such as Golem Network Tokens (GNT), Augur’s REP and Siacoin.
Alphabit is a Cayman Islands-based fund with $13 million AUM aiming to raise $300 million and also offer an ICO. Its uses a mix of manual trading, algorithmic trading, and ICO investing. It has so far invested in Ethereum, Ark, Ethereum Classic and PeerCoin, as well as ICOs MetalPay, Blocktix, Matchpool, Aeternity, and Skycoin.
Blockchain Capital is a unique case because it is the first VC that in 2013 started investing on blockchain companies, like Bitnet (sold to Rakuten) and Coinsetter (sold to Kraken). This spring, they raised a third round ($50mil) to invest not only in blockchain startups but also tokens. Then they tokenized $10 mil of this fund, selling BCAP tokens to the public (but only accredited investors in the U.S.).
Auryn Capital will launch this month with a $12.5 million. It will be the holding company for a crypto hedge fund that is actively managed with a mix of technical and fundamental strategies. It will also launch a decentralized exchange, and ICO incubator, and token called Karma (to launch this September).
SuperBloom launched in July with both a $10 million hedge/venture fund as well as an accelerator/investment bank. SuperBloom plans to hold a $30 million pre-ICO crowdsale for the Seed token this month for both accredited and non-accredited investors to fund its accelerator companies. Seed holders can exchange the token for an individual company’s pre-sale token for a 20% discount.
The BlockTower Capital fund, will also launch this month with about $50 million, and uses a mix of strategies: Event trading; new coin listings; “activist” investing in smaller cryptocurrencies and helping them gain traction with developers and on exchanges; and invest in themes such as decentralized file storage.
Coinshares 1 LP is the 2nd fund that Masters’ Global Advisors launched in June with $5 mil. In AUM. It is a Jersey-based fund investing in protocol tokens like Ether, Tezos and EOS. Its first company investment will be in decentralized ticketing platform, Aventus.
Pollinate Capital is a new hedge fund with more than $100mil committed for actively trading digital assets with strategies similar to Long/Short quantitative trading of futures and commodities trading.
Pantera Capital is launching a new hedge fund, Pantera ICO fund, focused on investments solely in tokens that power public blockchain protocols. Pantera was the first US Bitcoin investment firm in 2013.
The founders of Koalah, a mobile app in which players can bet on the outcome of games using bitcoin, launched in July Grasshopper Capital an actively managed cryptofund with $25mil. They are using a mix of fundamentals, event-driven arbitrage trading and algorithmic trading. The fund has so far invested in Ether, Civic, Bitcoin, Singles and Storj.
Efi Pylarinou is a Fintech thought-leader, strategic consultant and investor.
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Great round up. Is there any data to show where the $12bn+ into ICOs in 2017 (to end June) comes feon ie how much comes via these funds?
I haven’t found any data yet. It is really early. But since the bulk part of these hedge funds are fairly new, they start investing with larger cap digital coins (i.e.Bitcoin, ether, ripple, zcash, dash etc) and then allocate to ICOs like Civic, Tezos, etc.
My guesstimate is that currently no more than 20% of AUM they manage is invested in the recent ICOs. Given that their current AUM is not that large but will be growing, my second guesstimate is that they represent around 10% of the $12bn new ICOs. I see that growing fast as they gather assets and probably tripling by year end.