Other industry highlights:

• Options SMA Specialists Unveil New Fund, Crossing $50M AUM Across Products

• $100M Quant Fund Sees AUM Vanish Overnight Amid Liquidations

• Dubai-Based Fund of Funds Launches BTC Multiplier Fund, Gaining +0.5% During October Meltdown

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

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• Benefit from robust risk management and seamless onboarding designed for professional investors.

ML Tech is proud to be a sponsor of The Bridge conference in New York City on November 12, where we’ll be connecting with allocators and industry leaders shaping the future of digital asset investing. If you’re interested in connecting, please reach out to our COO, Marie Nuon, [email protected].

As we near the end of 2025, investors are encouraged to register and allocate capital to access ML Tech’s latest quantitative strategies and position portfolios ahead of 2026 market catalysts.

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^{🗞 Allocator Developments 🗞}

Crypto Arm of $26B Asset Manager Backs $1.8B DeFi Fund — Belem Capital has added Syz Capital, the alternative asset management arm of Geneva-based Syz Group, to its institutional LP base. The allocation was executed through two Syz-managed vehicles: the $200M Syz BTC Alpha Fund and Syz Crest Uncorrelated, an institutional-grade strategy launched in partnership with Willy Woo’s CMCC Crest. Belem Capital manages approximately $1.8B in AUM.

Private Investment Firm Winds Down $185B Seeding Arm — Bain Capital is in the process of shuttering a $2.4B unit dedicated to seeding and accelerating emerging managers with niche strategies. Bain’s allocator arm has previously backed multiple digital asset funds, including Temple Capital and Pangea Fund Management.

UAE Based Liquid Crypto Allocator Launches Venture FoF, Taps New CIO — Aspen Digital has appointed a new Chief Investment Officer to lead its limited partnership and direct primary and secondary investment efforts, coinciding with the launch of a venture-focused fund-of-funds strategy. The new vehicle will complement Aspen’s existing lineup of liquid, market-neutral, yield, and directional multi-manager offerings, and will provide institutional exposure to emerging blockchain managers, LP secondaries, GP stakes, and co-investments. Aspen manages approximately $150M within its liquid fund-of-funds platform.

Sports Bettor Who Turned $100 Into $6M Launches Multi-Manager Fund Pair — New Horizon Digital has launched its first institutional-grade digital asset strategies following a nine-month buildout of governance, infrastructure, and service provider relationships. The two flagship funds—offered in USD and BTC yield share classes—employ systematic, multi-manager approaches, allocating to more than 20 market neutral managers across the digital asset landscape. The firm has secured $20M in commitments, including $2M in personal capital from Managing Partner and CEO Francisco Quartin de Macedo.

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🔥 What’s Hot in Crypto 🔥

Options SMA Specialists Unveil New Fund, Crossing $50M AUM Across Products

QCI Capital Management has launched its flagship crypto options hedge fund, building on the derivatives-driven strategies that have defined its advisory platform, QCI Partners. The new vehicle offers accredited investors structured exposure to digital assets through volatility and tail-risk strategies.

Founded in 2011 in Henderson, Nevada, QCI Partners originally focused on options-based portfolios for high-net-worth individuals. The firm entered the digital asset markets in 2016, adapting its proprietary options pricing infrastructure to the nascent Bitcoin and Ethereum derivatives landscape. Today, QCI Capital Management manages both a dedicated hedge fund and an SMA business, combining more than $50M in crypto AUM. The SMA strategies have returned over 25% year-to-date, while the hedge fund, which launched in March and began trading in April, is up 15% year-to-date.

QCI’s investment strategy centers on a structured, volatility-driven approach. Core exposures include systematic options portfolios designed to exploit volatility surface dislocations, tail-hedge overlays targeting asymmetric payoffs during market regime shifts, and opportunistic directional trades when market structure or funding dislocations arise. The firm does not seek to track token performance, but instead treats volatility itself as an investable asset class. Supporting this effort is QCI’s proprietary Carr-Spada Model—a bespoke pricing system developed specifically for digital asset options markets.

The investment team is led by Co-Founders Matt Carr and Steven Melanson. Carr, who oversees strategy and portfolio construction, brings more than 18 years of experience in options and volatility trading and has been active in crypto since 2016. Melanson leads operations and risk, with two decades of expertise in wealth management and quantitative product design.

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$100M Quant Fund Sees AUM Vanish Overnight Amid Liquidations

A crypto hedge fund focused on quantitative trading strategies reportedly saw its assets under management fall from around $100M to nearly zero within hours on October 10, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Crypto Funds Watch has identified the fund but is withholding its name due to the sensitivity of the situation.

Backed by several prominent investors in the digital-asset space, the fund had delivered strong performance through 2024, with gross returns of more than 80% and a Sharpe ratio above 5. Many allocators had viewed its use of leverage as conservative. However, a sharp market sell-off—during which some altcoins lost over 90% in a single session—triggered forced liquidations that effectively wiped out the fund’s assets.

Investors with exposure to the fund are expected to rebalance portfolios in the coming weeks, and other managers may see outflows as allocators reassess risk.

Several firms, however, benefited from the volatility. LM5 Capital’s Gemini Fund ended the day with a net gain and is up 22% gross on the year. Pythagoras Fund, one of the longest-running crypto quant firms with around $280M in assets, posted positive results across all four of its strategies on October 12: Absolute Return (+4.6%), Arbitrage (+2.85%), Long-Short Statistical Arbitrage (+1%), and BTC Alpha Long Biased (+4.9%).

Re7 Capital, a DeFi-focused hedge fund managing over $1B, also navigated the downturn effectively. Its market-neutral strategy took advantage of pricing dislocations, while its Bitcoin yield strategy had been “cautiously” positioned ahead of the drop.

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Dubai-Based Fund of Funds Launches BTC Multiplier Fund, Gaining +0.5% During October Meltdown

Pelican Investments, a Dubai-based fund of funds focused on liquid crypto hedge fund strategies, is doubling down on its BTC Multiplier fund—a yield-oriented Bitcoin strategy—as institutional demand continues to shift toward lower-risk, income-generating digital asset products. Despite October’s sharp drawdown in crypto markets, the strategy delivered an estimated +0.5% net return for the month.

Structured to provide stable, yield-based exposure to Bitcoin, the BTC Multiplier strategy has become Pelican’s priority product, aligning with allocator appetite for defensive digital asset solutions that can complement traditional portfolios. The fund targets 7–10% annualized net returns and employs a disciplined framework to generate consistent income while limiting directional risk—offering steady participation in Bitcoin’s upside without the volatility of outright spot exposure.

Pelican’s broader offering spans three additional core strategies: Growth, Balanced, and Market Neutral. The Growth strategy takes a long-biased, high-conviction approach, targeting alpha across a rotating universe of roughly 100 tokens beyond BTC and ETH. Designed to deliver crypto upside within a traditional portfolio, it embraces volatility and market sensitivity. The Balanced strategy blends long-short, algorithmic, and quant trading to deliver more consistent returns with lower correlation to both crypto and traditional markets. Meanwhile, the Market Neutral strategy emphasizes stability, applying delta-neutral and low-volatility techniques to achieve a high Sharpe ratio—positioning it well for allocators seeking uncorrelated returns.

Following an oversubscribed GP round and a $5M capital deployment this summer, the firm is now engaged in active LP conversations across global markets. Pelican’s institutional edge is underpinned by a top-tier investment team with a successful track record spanning traditional finance and digital assets.

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 With losses from smart contract exploits surpassing $2 billion this year alone, it’s never been more important to secure your crypto.

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🍿 Blockchain Bytes 🍿

• $10B AUM CoinShares plans to acquire FCA-regulated Bastion Asset Management to add quantitative alpha strategies and expand its active crypto investment offering (Coinshares)

• Monarq Asset Management wins bid to become asset manager for Avalanche Treasury Co. (AVAT), an ecosystem-aligned digital asset treasury (DAT) company. Monarq has become the go-to asset manager in the DAT space now also managing BONK holdings treasury, Pineapple Financial, Sharps Technology, Inc., ReserveOne (Businesswire)

• Psalion, a $150M DeFi asset manager with over five years of track record of producing low volatility returns, has launched Psalion VC Fund III, according to sources familiar with the matter (Psalion)

• Hyperithm, one of Asia’s first crypto hedge funds, has surpassed $1B in AUM across HFT, market-neutral trading, DeFi vaults, secondaries, venture, and liquidity provisioning, with a 25% annualized return since 2020 (Hyperithim)

• Keyrock, a digital asset market maker, acquires Turing Capital for $27.8M launching an asset and wealth management division to expand services for institutional clients (The Block)

• Re7 Capital launches a BTC yield strategy with StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation, using a market-neutral, BTC-denominated approach combining options trading and DeFi staking. It has secured 2,000 BTC (+$200M) in commitments and will be offered institutionally and via Midas (Re7 Capital)

• Pantera is closing its Blockchain Fund V, a hybrid venture-style fund that combines private equity and hedge fund strategies. The fund has generated $670M in gains through liquid token trading and special opportunities, doubling its committed capital with $1.3B in assets before fully calling capital (Pantera Capital)

• 3iQ has partnered with Further to launch a digital asset multi-strategy hedge fund for institutional investors, building on 3iQ’s QMAP platform ($50M AUM) and infrastructure to offer secure, risk-managed crypto exposure (3iQ)

• Joe Naggar, former GoldenTree partner, has launched Feynman Point Asset Management with $300M in AUM, spinning out from Republic Digital. The fund focuses on digital assets and frontier tech, posting a 42% annualized return since 2022 with notable bets on GBTC, Hyperliquid, and Ripple (Forbes)

• 💼 Career Shifts — Matthew Miller, former Head of BD at Hivemind, joined long/short fund MJL Capital (Miller); $125M Temple Capital appointed former Spool CEO Valerie Schaber as Director (Schaber); and Katy Allen became Head of BD at multi-strat fund Room40 (Allen)

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