Industry highlights:

• $10M HFT Firm Seeks Fundraising Specialist Following Strong Track Record

• Former $100M Crypto Macro PM Bets Big on New Hedge Fund Launch

• Emerging Multi-Strat Brings on Former $100B Money Manager and Soros Fund PM Ahead of Live Trading Rollout

…but first, let’s raise a glass to CFW’s official sponsor for 2025 🥂

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^{🗞 Allocator Developments 🗞}

$125M Multi-Manager Launches First Venture Fund of Funds — According to a source close to the matter, Exponential Age Asset Management is launching a new growth equity and venture fund of funds strategy. Its flagship, the Exponential Age Digital Assets Fund, is a long-biased multi-manager fund offering exposure to the exponential growth of blockchain technology.

$1.6B Quant Derivs Manager Relaunches Alpha Program as Multi-Strat — QVR Advisors has begun trading its relaunched Absolute Return Strategy with $75M and is allocating its own capital to external managers. Benn Eifert, Founder and Co-CIO of QVR Advisors, boasts a large following on X often posting about digital currency markets.

+$2B Asia Multi-Family Office Announces Digital Asset Fund — Raffles Family Office (RFO) has announced its inaugural full digital asset fund through its flagship company, Raffles Assets Management (HK) Co. Limited (RAMHK), the multi-family office based in Singapore and Hong Kong. Denominated in USD the fund aims to provide actively managed exposure and dynamic allocation to top liquid cryptocurrencies.

Rothschild Family Backed Fund of Funds Seeds BTC Yield Fund — Aspen Digital, a UAE based crypto fund of funds, is one of several prominent LPs that have seeded Coinbase Asset Management’s Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund, a long-bitcoin fund that seeks 4-8% net returns in BTC. Notable backers of Aspen Digital include: Everest Ventures Group, TTB Partners and RIT Capital Partners (formerly Rothschild Investment Trust).

$50M Multi-Manager Waves Goodbye to its Head of Liquid Fund Allocations — Louis LaValle, former Executive Vice President of 3IQ’s Hedge Fund Solutions, is “Building Something New” as CEO and Managing Partner of a startup building in stealth.

Crypto’s Biggest Back $3B Bitcoin Fund — Cantor Fitzgerald is establishing a $3B cryptocurrency venture to acquire bitcoin (emulating the success of MicroStrategy). Dubbed 21 Capital, the fund is slated to receive $3B in bitcoin from its partners: $1.5B from Tether, $900M from SoftBank, and $600M from Bitfinex.

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🔥 What’s Hot in Crypto 🔥

$10M HFT Firm Seeks Fundraising Specialist Following Strong Track Record

K2 Trading Partners, a quantitative crypto HFT hedge fund that began as a proprietary trading desk in 2021, is reportedly preparing to hire a dedicated fundraising specialist. The move comes after the firm established a successful public track record over the past three years, highlighting its ambitions to broaden its investor base.

Since its inception, K2 has delivered consistent double-digit annualized returns, including a standout 61.68% gain in 2023 and a 22.62% return in 2024. Sources close to the firm indicate that the fund is up modestly in 2025 about 4% ITD (April), continuing its streak of positive performance. K2’s investment approach centers on generating stable returns across market cycles, employing a zero-delta trading strategy that eliminates residual market exposure at all times.

Operating under an open market-neutral mandate, K2 executes a range of strategies, including futures-spot basis arbitrage, funding rate arbitrage, and cross-exchange arbitrage. The firm is also a high volume participant in B3 (Brazilian Stock Exchange) doing delta neutral strategies on its Bitcoin future’s, The firm also allocates roughly 5% of its assets to delta-neutral strategies within the DeFi ecosystem. K2’s nine-person team is composed largely of PhDs, engineers, and developers with deep expertise in systematic trading and arbitrage.

The firm is led by co-founder Mateus Angelo Castro, a Citi alumnus who spent years at the investment bank trading deskand currently heads the investment team. CEO Hugo Xavier brings additional trading expertise in crypto since 2016, having previously built a major OTC desk in Brazil that facilitated more than $4B in liquidity transactions.

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Former $100M Crypto Macro PM Bets Big on New Hedge Fund Launch

Chris Cecere, the former Global Head of Macro and Trading at Asymmetric Financial, has left the firm to launch his own crypto hedge fund, Traditional Digital. Cecere’s departure marks a notable shift for Asymmetric, which has rapidly emerged as one of the top-performing crypto investment firms since its inception in 2022.

Cecere is a veteran macro trader and risk manager with over 20 years of experience across premier institutions including Brevan Howard and leading global banks. At Asymmetric, he played a pivotal role in developing the firm’s trading infrastructure, scaling its AUM to over $100M, and establishing it as the highest-performing hedge fund globally across all asset classes since inception.

Asymmetric Financial continues to manage a suite of crypto-focused investment vehicles, including the Asymmetric Liquid Venture Fund, Asymmetric Yield Fund, and Asymmetric Bitcoin Fund. Each strategy is tailored for differentiated exposure across early-stage token projects, DeFi-based yield opportunities, and institutional-grade bitcoin investing. The firm is in the midst of an ambitious $1B capital raise targeting major allocators such as a16z, Paradigm, and Solana Labs.

Cecere’s new venture, Traditional Digital, is positioned to bring institutional macro trading discipline to digital assets. The firm’s debut vehicle, the TradDi Select Fund, is a long/short discretionary liquid strategy focused primarily on the top 10 digital assets by market capitalization. Designed for high-net-worth individuals, family offices, fund of funds, and institutions, the fund offers monthly liquidity, a transparent fee structure, and robust operational infrastructure.

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Emerging Multi-Strat Brings on Former $100B Money Manager and Soros Fund PM Ahead of Live Trading Rollout

Dair Capital is building momentum in 2025, expanding its team and preparing to launch a series of new strategies aimed at institutional investors. Founded by Darren Dineen, a former Director at Boolean Investment Holdings and an advisor to Delphi Digital, Consensys, and European institutions, Dair Capital positions itself as a global asset management and advisory firm focused on non-correlated, volatility-driven returns.

The firm recently added several senior leaders to its platform. Dmitri Tikhonov, former CIO of Record Currency Management, joins as a senior strategic advisor, bringing decades of experience managing over $100B in institutional mandates across FX, macro, and quantitative strategies. Kas Vard, formerly a PM at Soros and Davidson Kempner, now leads Dair’s quant division, applying advanced AI and machine learning techniques to deepen signal discovery and alpha generation. Additionally, Nikos Katsaounis has joined as an advisor, bringing frontier market expertise shaped by his family's leadership at FMN, a major African agro-industrial group.

In parallel, the firm is preparing to roll out a range of structured products designed to offer capital protection with upside participation, developed in collaboration with Tier 1 institutions. Dair’s Special Opportunities Fund — SOF 1: Double Sharp — is also slated to begin deploying capital this quarter.

Dair Capital’s investment approach is rooted in quantitative volatility trading, long/short derivatives strategies, and value investing, with an emphasis on generating alpha independently of traditional long-only digital asset exposure.

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🍿 Blockchain Bytes 🍿

• Maven 11 closed its third fund at $107M, surpassing its $100M target, and will continue backing early-stage web3 and crypto projects with ticket sizes between $500,000 and $5M (Maven 11)

• Newly launched Euler vaults on Avalanche, curated by Re7 Labs, have already attracted $68.5M+ in supply and $49M+ in borrows within just 48 hours — Re7 Labs is a subsidiary of Re7 Capital, a DeFi investment firm with an AUM exceeding over a half a billion dollars (Re7 Labs)

• Haun Ventures is raising $1B across two new crypto funds. The firm plans to allocate $500M to early-stage startups and $500M to later-stage projects, focusing on areas like decentralized infrastructure, on-chain AI, and tokenized real-world assets (Fortune)

• Pilgrim Partners Asia ($2.4B AUM) launched the Peakwater Volatility Alpha Fund under Pilgrim Investment VCC in Singapore, focusing on global cross-asset volatility trading with a digital asset volatility edge (Albert Ee)

• ABCDE, the $400M Web3 investment fund, has paused new investments and fundraising efforts to concentrate on supporting its current portfolio and launching Vernal, a new crypto incubator. The firm cited a challenging primary market environment as a key reason for the shift in strategy (Cointelegraph).

• DNA Fund, which manages around $700M in assets, is opening its flagship Helix Venture Fund to outside investors ahead of a planned public offering. The firm continues to back high-conviction crypto projects while expanding access through its online investment platform (DL News).

• Ouroboros Capital, a DeFi fund based in Asia, is building Yuzu Money, a crypto neobank featuring an onchain DeFi balance sheet and integrated smart contract insurance. The team recently completed its MVP and is raising a seed round to scale operations (Ouroboros Capital)

• Crypto hedge funds are ramping up fundraising efforts with senior hires: Borderless Capital ($500M+ AUM) named Andrew Dempsey as Partner – Head of Capital Formation, Blockchain Capital ($2.4B AUM) added Donna Kampschuur as Head of Investor Relations, Fasanara Digital ($275M AUM) hired Paolo Viale to lead BD for its quant unit, and Pantera Capital ($4B AUM) appointed Thomas Rose as Senior Director of Capital Formation (Linkedin).

• Blockstream secured $3B to launch three new Bitcoin investment funds, including two focused on Bitcoin lending. The initiative marks a major push to rebuild the crypto lending sector and strengthen institutional Bitcoin finance, with the first fund accepting external capital by July 1 (CryptoNinjas).

• RockawayX closed a new $125M early-stage crypto venture fund, targeting the Solana ecosystem, DeFi projects, and networks powered by RockawayX native hardware. The firm’s 2021 VCI fund achieved a 2.1x DPI and a 5.4x MOIC, with portfolio highlights including Solana, Wintermute, and Morpho Labs (RockawayX)

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