Other industry highlights:

• Fully Autonomous Quant Shop Launches V2 Frontier Model After 145.56% Cumulative Returns Since Inception

• Canadian Asset Manager Wins Mandate Backed by Nation’s 10K BTC Treasury

• Overseas Hedge Fund Wins Allocation From $194M Japanese Pension

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^{🗞 Allocator Developments 🗞}

$260B Alts Platform Adds First Crypto VC Fund — Pantera Capital's Fund V is now available on Morgan Stanley's Alternative Investments platform, marking the first blockchain venture fund to be offered through a Tier 1 global wealth management platform. The addition gives more than 16,000 Morgan Stanley financial advisors access to the fund through the firm's alternatives platform, which oversees approximately $260B in AUM.

Canadian Asset Manager Wins Mandate Backed by Nation’s 10K BTC Treasury — Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC), Bhutan's Special Administrative Region, appoints 3iQ to manage a dedicated mandate backed by a portion of its bitcoin treasury as it builds a digital asset fund ecosystem. The partnership also includes establishing a local presence, investing in talent development, and supporting the city's ambition to become a digital offshore financial hub following its plan to allocate up to 10,000 BTC toward GMC's development.

Legacy Blockchain VC FoF Pivots to Secondary Markets — Hutt Capital is repositioning its business to focus primarily on blockchain venture secondaries, shifting away from its broader fund of funds model to concentrate on acquiring LP interests, direct secondaries, and fund restructurings. The firm argues that blockchain venture remains undervalued relative to AI despite improving fundamentals and growing adoption, and sees a compelling opportunity as more than $85B in crypto venture capital matures and limited partners increasingly seek liquidity.

Overseas Hedge Fund Wins Allocation From $194M Japanese Pension — Japan's National Business Pension Fund Association, which manages approximately ¥21.5B ($194M) on behalf of roughly 1,200 small and mid-sized companies, plans to allocate 1% of its portfolio to a cryptocurrency fund managed by an overseas hedge fund. The move follows recent updates to Japan's Financial Instruments and Exchange Act and reflects growing institutional interest in digital assets as a portfolio diversifier with low correlation to traditional holdings.

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🔥 What’s Hot in Crypto 🔥

Fully Autonomous Quant Shop Launches V2 Frontier Model After 145.56% Cumulative Returns Since Inception

Nautilus Labs is expanding its AI-native quantitative trading platform with the development of Seneca V2, a next-generation frontier model designed to increase trading frequency and capture shorter-term market opportunities. The initiative follows a strong track record for the firm's flagship strategy, which generated a 145.56% cumulative return from inception in April 2025 through June 2026, alongside a 2.73 Sharpe ratio, 5.46 Sortino ratio, and 129.38% alpha versus a buy-and-hold benchmark.

Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Tom Serres and John Occhipenti, Nautilus has quietly operated its AI-driven strategies through separately managed accounts (SMAs) while also managing proprietary capital alongside client assets. As it scales, the firm has continued to build institutional-grade infrastructure through integrations with leading exchanges and custodians. Its flagship Seneca Prime Composite strategy trades BTC, ETH, and SOL using adaptive long/short positioning designed to generate returns across varying market environments while maintaining low reported correlation to Bitcoin.

At the core of the platform is Seneca, a proprietary transformer model built specifically for financial markets. Rather than relying on general-purpose AI, the fully autonomous platform ingests virtually any form of time-series data to dynamically generate multi-billion-parameter, regime- and market-aware models, which are then composed into algorithmic trading strategies through Seneca's proprietary quantitative trading engine. Operating with no human-in-the-loop, the system continuously builds market microstructure models, develops competing trading strategies, and selects the strongest predictive signals. The current platform seeks to forecast the direction of every hourly price bar while remaining continuously invested through dynamic long and short positioning, resulting in approximately 77x portfolio turnover over a 30-day period.

The firm's next milestone is Seneca V2, a more advanced frontier model designed to predict lower time-frame price movements, enabling significantly higher trading frequency and more responsive portfolio management. Combined with continued expansion across top-tier exchanges and custodial partners, the upgrade reflects Nautilus' strategy of advancing beyond traditional quantitative models toward fully autonomous, AI-native trading infrastructure built for institutional capital.

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Vienna Based Investment Firm Packages Two-Year ETH Track Record Into Listed Investment Vehicle

Vienna-based research and investment firm Fountainhead Digital has opened its proprietary Ethereum strategy, Guardian Core, to institutional investors. After two years of live signal generation, the strategy is now investable through a listed instrument.

Fountainhead works with independent wealth managers, private banks and (multi)-family offices, and develops systematic strategies for digital assets. Many of those counterparties want long exposure to participate in the long-term potential of the asset class, but they are wary of its volatility and its drawdowns.

Guardian Core is the firm's answer to that problem. It is a rules-based, long-only strategy that systematically adjusts ETH exposure using derivatives market signals that identify shifts in market sentiment and in broader market regimes. Exposure increases in favourable regimes and is scaled back as risk conditions deteriorate. The strategy takes no short position in ETH and applies no leverage.

Guardian Core has been generating live trading signals since August 2024. Over the period from August 1, 2024, through June 30, 2026, Guardian Core returned +20 per cent (pro-forma, net of a 2/20 fee load and trading costs), against a loss of 51 per cent for a passive Ethereum holding over the same period. Annualised volatility was 35 per cent against 71 per cent for the passive holding, and the maximum drawdown 51 per cent against 68 per cent.

The full daily series, regime overlay and risk metrics are available in the interactive performance chart.

The methodology has been featured by Glassnode.

Guardian Core is licensed (non-exclusively) to a regulated European issuer and is being implemented in an exchange-traded instrument listed on a European stock exchange.

Fountainhead Digital was founded in 2023 by Anton Werner, Martin Bechter and Vicky Yang, whose backgrounds span venture capital and quantitative trading.

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🍿 Blockchain Bytes 🍿

• Psalion, a Singapore based VC and DeFi fund, launches a $50M venture fund, its third and largest to date, targeting pre-seed and seed-stage blockchain startups across infrastructure, real-world assets, stablecoins, DeFi, trade finance, and consumer applications (Fidelity)

• KB Financial Group establishes the ₩100B KB AX Digital Asset Fund to invest in early-stage domestic digital asset companies and AI technology firms, including developers of AI models, applications, and data analytics (The Chosun)

• Re7 Capital, one of the largest DeFi funds in digital assets, launches Fate, an experimental platform that groups prediction markets into thematic, continuously rebalanced indexes, beginning with a "Chaos vs. Stability" strategy. The platform automatically rolls expiring markets into new ones, allowing users to gain ongoing exposure to market-implied probabilities around major geopolitical events (Re7 Capital)

• Fasanara Digital, which manages approximately $250M in assets, marks the seventh anniversary of its market-neutral digital asset fund. The firm has grown to a team of 30 and is expanding its investment team with hires across quantitative trading and research (Fasanara Digital)

• Paradigm closes its fourth fund at $1.2B, bringing fresh capital to investments across crypto, AI, robotics, and other frontier technologies. The firm says it will continue backing founders at every stage, with recent investments including Hyperliquid, Tempo, Kalshi, Zipline, and Nous Research (Paradigm)

• Gumi partners with SBI Financial Services to launch SBI Crypto Fund I, a ¥3B (approximately $188M) fund that invests primarily in Bitcoin and major altcoins. Backed by investors including Daiwa Securities Group, the three-year fund also employs staking, rebalancing, and hedging strategies (Coinmarket Cap)

• ReDeFi Capital, a multi-strategy digital asset hedge fund that targeted $20M for its Special Situations Fund II in 2025, highlights new alert and trading systems built during the second quarter to strengthen its DeFi investment capabilities. The firm says subdued crypto markets in 2026 have accelerated its focus on proprietary research and automated trading infrastructure, including the manual testing of niche strategies ahead of broader automation (ReDeFi)

• Hyperithm, one of Asia's longest-running crypto hedge funds with approximately $600M in assets under management, launches CTA Systematic Alpha on Neutral Trade, bringing an on-chain version of a traditional systematic equity strategy to investors. The long-only strategy trades liquid U.S. equity ETFs and index futures using a combination of mean reversion and trend-following signals (Hyperithm)

• Hilbert Group launches an institutional lending desk through its Hilbert Finance division, offering bespoke overcollateralized stablecoin loans backed by a broad range of digital assets (Hilbert Group)

• Galaxy launches Galaxy Curator, an institutional vault curation service built on Morpho and distributed through Fireblocks Earn, allowing institutions to access curated on-chain stablecoin yield strategies without building their own DeFi infrastructure. The offering extends Galaxy's institutional lending and risk management platform—which includes an average $1.4B loan book and more than $3B in staked assets—to on-chain yield products (Galaxy)

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