Other industry highlights:

• Multi-Strat Merges With DeFi Fund to Form $50M Asset Manager

• Prop Shop Launches Market-Neutral Vault With 32% Return

• Decentralized AI Fund Targets $40M Raise

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^{🗞 Allocator Developments 🗞}

Central Bank to Allocate $350M Across Crypto Hedge Funds and VC Funds — The National Investment Corporation, a subsidiary of the National Bank of Kazakhstan, has allocated $350M from sovereign reserves to invest in cryptocurrency via hedge funds and venture capital vehicles. The program will initially deploy capital through five selected crypto-focused hedge funds, with future investments made through VC funds rather than direct crypto holdings, as part of the country’s broader push to build a sovereign crypto reserve.

Crypto Fund of Funds Targets $100M Secondary Vehicle — Pure Crypto has held a first close on a $100M opportunistic fund focused on acquiring secondary LP interests across its existing crypto-focused venture and hedge fund portfolio. The firm’s third vehicle will use a PE-style drawdown structure and invest exclusively with managers it has previously backed, targeting an even mix of venture and long-biased liquid funds while avoiding high-frequency strategies.

$3B Singapore Based MFO Partners with $250M Crypto Quant Fund — Wealth Management Alliance (WMA), a Singapore-regulated allocator overseeing roughly $3B in AUM, has partnered with Algoz Technologies to launch the AiQP Meta Fund for accredited and institutional investors. The vehicle provides allocators—including family offices and fund-of-funds that lack mandates for SMAs—access to Algoz’s systematic crypto trading strategy through a regulated fund structure. WMA will serve as the wealth manager and oversee portfolio and risk management, enabling institutional capital to gain diversified, yield-focused exposure to digital assets within Singapore’s regulatory framework.

Digital Wealth Adviser Allocates $250M BTC to $1.75B RIA Specialist — Digital Wealth Partners, an investment adviser focused on digital assets, has selected Two Prime, an SEC-registered investment adviser and institutional bitcoin lender with approximately $1.75B in assets, to manage approximately $250M in bitcoin on behalf of its clients.

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🔥 What’s Hot in Crypto 🔥

Multi-Strat Merges With DeFi Fund to Form $50M Asset Manager

Bizantine Capital has announced a strategic merger with Carpathian Capital Management, uniting a global digital asset manager with a DeFi-native operator to create a scaled, institutional-grade decentralized finance platform. Under the transaction, Carpathian will become Bizantine’s dedicated DeFi division, operating under a unified brand aimed at expanding compliant institutional access to decentralized yield, liquidity, and governance strategies.

The merger positions Bizantine at the forefront of institutional DeFi by combining its capital formation capabilities and global partnerships with Carpathian’s on-chain operational expertise. Carpathian brings deep experience in vault curation, DeFi fund infrastructure, and audit-ready yield strategies, strengthening Bizantine’s ability to deploy decentralized products through institutionally structured vehicles.

Together, the firms now manage more than $50M in assets, providing a foundation to scale DAO-driven and tokenized fund structures across multiple jurisdictions. The combined platform will focus on multi-vault strategies spanning BTC, XRP, stablecoins, and real-world asset ecosystems.

As part of the integration, Carpathian founder Noah Bortnick has been appointed Head of DeFi and On-Chain Operations at Bizantine Capital, where he will oversee decentralized fund strategies, protocol partnerships, and vault product development. Bizantine’s existing leadership team, including co-founder and advisor March Zheng and co-founder Andrew Bakst, will continue in their roles.

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Prop Shop Launches Market-Neutral Vault With 32% Return

Hekaton Trading is launching the Atomic Vault System, a self-custodial DeFi vault platform on Solana that brings institutional-grade, market-neutral yield fully on-chain. Set to debut in Q1 2026, the platform reflects a shift away from traditional fund structures toward transparent, smart contract–based strategies that allow investors to retain custody of their assets while accessing quantitative returns.

The flagship vault will focus exclusively on blue-chip assets—SOL, wETH, and wBTC—offering a differentiated alternative to the leveraged JLP-style vaults that dominate Solana today. Designed for institutions and treasuries seeking on-chain yield without impermanent loss or memecoin exposure, the vault emphasizes liquidity, asset quality, and capital efficiency.

At its core, the Atomic Vault deploys market-neutral strategies that capture yield and arbitrage opportunities across Solana's DeFi ecosystem while maintaining delta-neutral positioning. Since September 2025, the strategy has generated a +32.13% total return with a Sharpe ratio of 8.70 and materially lower volatility than major digital assets, underscoring its effectiveness across market environments.

Founded in 2016, Hekaton is a Miami-based proprietary trading firm specializing in digital assets, developing algorithmic trading strategies and low-latency infrastructure at the cutting edge of decentralized finance. Led by co-founders Malik Corbett and Tynan Overstreet, the Atomic Vault System marks the firm's first external-facing product, extending institutional trading capabilities into a self-custodial, on-chain format for qualified investors.

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Decentralized AI Fund Targets $40M Raise

Several months after its November 2025 launch, Stillcore Capital is emerging as one of the first investment funds dedicated exclusively to decentralized artificial intelligence (deAI). The U.S.-based manager is focused on delivering institutional-grade exposure to the Bittensor ecosystem, positioning decentralized AI as an emerging crypto-native platform alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum as allocator interest begins to build.

The firm is led by partners Mark Jeffrey, an early Bitcoin adopter, Bittensor specialist, and host of The Hash Rate podcast; Jason Calacanis, a prominent podcaster and early investor in companies including Uber, Robinhood, and Calm; and Rob Greer, a former private equity investor and early Bittensor participant. Together, the team blends venture investing experience with deep protocol-level insight across decentralized AI infrastructure.

According to SEC EDGAR filings, Stillcore is targeting $40M for its newest fund. The strategy is anchored in the Bittensor ecosystem and its native TAO token, combining core TAO acquisition and staking with selective allocations to AI subnets. These subnets function as decentralized AI startups operating directly on-chain, spanning use cases from drug discovery to predictive analytics.

Stillcore manages diversified exposure across the decentralized AI stack while abstracting away the operational complexity of direct wallet management, custody, and staking. With flexibility to expand into additional decentralized AI protocols over time, the fund is positioning itself as an early institutional gateway to the rapidly evolving deAI landscape.

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🍿 Blockchain Bytes 🍿

• Escape Velocity raises a $62M fund to back decentralised physical infrastructure networks with fund of funds Cendana committing $15M as the largest check (Fortune)

• Sygnum attracts more than 750 BTC (+$65M) for its new Bitcoin income funds, which use systematic arbitrage between spot and derivatives markets to target 8%–10% yields (Crypto Economy)

• Laser Digital launches the tokenised Bitcoin Diversified Yield Fund SP, targeting excess returns on top of BTC performance through market-neutral arbitrage, lending, and options strategies (Laser Digital)

• ReDeFi rolls capital from Fund I into Fund II to capitalise on special situation and event-driven opportunities in crypto, after Fund I ranks in the top 5% of crypto funds between 2022 and 2024 according to HFR benchmarking (ReDeFi)

• Alejandra Martinez, a crypto and fintech investor at Foundation Capital ($5bn–$6bn AUM), was named one of Venture Capital Journal’s 2026 Rising Stars following recent crypto investments and her work to expand female angel investing in Latin America (Venture Capital Journal)

• Third Eye Fund, a $75M multi-strategy crypto fund, launches a prediction market vault on Ember Protocol, attracting more than $1M in deposits and targeting 30%+ returns as one of the first products offering investors exposure to actively managed prediction market strategies (Ember Protocol)

• According to recent SEC EDGAR filings, Philip Press launches Lantern Beta Strategies following the 2024 wind-down of North Rock Digital, which RCM Alternatives reports previously managed +$100M with a long-biased strategy and alpha-capture overlays (RCM Alternatives)

• Galaxy Digital is preparing to launch a $100M crypto-focused hedge fund in Q1 2026, aiming to capitalize on volatility through long and short positions across tokens and listed financial services companies tied to digital asset adoption (Hedgeweek)

• Hyper-Alpha Capital and Atomic Digital posted strong 2025 performances, with the long/short crypto fund Hyper-Alpha delivering a 40.99% lifetime return over its first seven months of trading, while market-neutral DeFi fund Atomic Digital closed the year up 24.12% (Asher Ang)

• Blockstream Capital Partners has acquired a Bitcoin-focused trading division from Numeus Group, adding yield-oriented derivatives strategies and a 10-person trading team, following its December acquisition of Corbiere Capital Management (Komainu)

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