Other industry highlights:

• Circle Vet Launches Fund II After Fund I's Exceptional Performance

• Legacy Long Biased Crypto Hedge Fund Expands Investment Strategy with Target to Grow AUM to $150M

• AQR Alums to Launch Institutional-Grade SMA Investment Platform

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

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^{🗞 Allocator Developments 🗞}

Crypto Venture Fund Turns into $10B Family Office — Changpeng Zhao, Binance co-founder and ex-CEO, has rebranded Binance Labs into YZi Labs, a $10B family office. Investment amounts range from $500K–$50M. The firm will invest across crypto, AI and biotech. The firm’s crypto investment mandate includes liquid and venture investments.

$190M Crypto Fund to Allocate to Quant Strats — Fasanara Digital, a quantitative investment fund specializing in digital assets and a part of Fasanara Capital—a London-based institutional asset manager with over $4B in assets under management—is actively seeking allocations to external systematic quant strategies with a Sharpe ratio above 2.

Crypto FoF Notches Top Spot Again on HSBC List — Exponential Age Asset Management (EXPAAM), a $125M digital assets fund of funds specializing in mainly long-only investments, has secured the top spot on HSBC’s Top & Bottom 20 Funds 2024 list with a 61.87% return net of fees.

€250M Multi-Strat Presents at Crypto Alpha Talk — Rcube Asset Management, a Paris-based firm specializing in incubating emerging portfolio managers, presented its Rcube Digital Multi Strategies fund at the firm’s Crypto Alpha Talk earlier this week. The fund dynamically allocates capital to liquid absolute return strategies in the digital asset space.

Texas Based Crypto Native FO Appoints New CIO — Digital Wealth Partners (DWP), a $150M RIA specializing in digital assets and alternative investments, has appointed Matthew Snider as Chief Investment Officer. In 2024, DWP launched its first set of hedge fund strategies, including market-neutral, levered, and long-only approaches.

HF Backer Targets $400M Fund to Invest in Emerging Managers — Borealis Strategic Capital Management, a dedicated seed capital provider for early-stage hedge fund managers, is aiming to raise between $300M and $400M for its third fund. The firm plans to deploy this capital across four to six investments in emerging hedge fund managers. The firm highlighted digital asset funds in its most recent Hedge Fund New Launch Landscape Report.

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🔥 What’s Hot in Crypto 🔥

Circle Vet Launches Fund II After Fund I's Exceptional Performance

According to recent SEC filings, Breed VC, a pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm specializing in crypto investments, is launching Fund II. This follows the success of Fund I, which managed $20M in AUM and was backed by some of the most prominent figures in the crypto industry, including Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin; Nic Carter, co-founder of Castle Island Ventures; Dan Matuszewski, co-founder of CMS Holdings; and Spencer Noon, former GP at Variant and founder of OurNetwork.

Since its inception in 2023, Fund I has invested in five unicorn companies, including Monad, Ethena, Usual, and Plume. One of Breed VC’s portfolio companies, Arbelos Markets, a quant trading firm, was recently acquired by FalconX, a leading crypto prime broker last valued at $8B.

No public details have been released regarding Fund II, Crypto Funds Watch reached out to Founder Jed Breed, who had no comment.

Breed VC is led by Jed Breed and David Hsu, two seasoned crypto investors with extensive experience in the industry. Breed has spent the last eleven years in crypto. He was previously Head of Digital Assets at Circle, where he helped launch USDC—now a $35B asset. He also managed Accomplice VC’s internal DeFi fund. Hsu has eight years of experience in crypto. Before joining Breed VC, he was Head of Crypto at Wellington Management, a multi-trillion-dollar asset manager, where he led all crypto initiatives.

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Legacy Long Biased Crypto Hedge Fund Expands Investment Strategy with Target to Grow AUM to $150M

Bizantine Capital, one of the oldest crypto hedge funds, is expanding its investment strategy with a target to grow its AUM from $70M to $150M by the end of the year. Founded in 2018, the firm focuses on macroeconomic investment strategies, identifying pricing inefficiencies in public and private markets.

With a strong belief that public blockchain technology remains significantly undervalued, Bizantine Capital bridges the gap between the United States and China, the world's two largest economies, leveraging its strategic position for global investment opportunities.

The firm’s investment strategy is divided into 70% liquid token investments and 30% venture investments. On the liquid token side, Bizantine Capital maintains positions in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, dynamically rebalancing the portfolio based on changing market conditions. On the venture side, the firm has been a pioneer in emerging industries, being among the first to invest in Regenerative Finance (ReFi) projects such as KlimaDAO. Currently, the firm is focusing on Decentralized Science (DeSci) investments, including HairDAO, a decentralized organization dedicated to developing better solutions for hair loss.

Bizantine Capital's leadership team brings expertise in blockchain and macroeconomic investing. Co-Founder and Managing Partner March Zheng has invested in blockchain since 2016, leveraging insights from Eastern and Western markets. The team also includes Co-Founder Andrew Bakst, Managing Partners Roland Li and Tony Ling, Engineer Mike Lee, and Venture Partner Cameron Sepahi.

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AQR Alums to Launch Institutional-Grade SMA Investment Platform

Truvius, an institutional-grade investment management platform and SEC-registered investment advisor, is set to officially launch in early Q1, offering sophisticated digital asset strategies to high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), family offices, and funds-of-funds, among other institutional investor profiles. The firm differentiates itself by directly servicing investors with proprietary systematic strategies (quant-driven active long-only separately managed accounts (SMAs)) easily accessed through a sleek investor app.

Founded by CEO Connor Farley and COO/CFO Max Freccia, both formerly at AQR Capital, Truvius applies a fundamentals-driven systematic investment approach, utilizing thematic indices and actively managed multi-index models. The platform integrates a combination of traditional factors (ex: price momentum) and a large suite of on-chain signals to build diversified portfolios of around 30 assets, aiming to outperform the broader market.

As a tech-driven asset manager for digital assets, Truvius curates and actively manages portfolios for affluent clients. The platform streamlines the investment process: clients create an account, which is held with Anchorage Digital as the custodian, select from a suite of investment strategies, and have their portfolios automatically rebalanced by Truvius.

The firm has already secured pre-seed funding from notable investors, including Galaxy Digital and New Form Capital. Truvius has onboarded 20-30 investors in a closed beta to refine its trading and onboarding processes prior to launching publicly, and is positioning itself for additional venture funding to grow AUM and expand its product suite to meet the needs of cutting-edge wealthy investors, such as tax-aware investment strategies.

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🍿 Blockchain Bytes 🍿

• Samara Alpha Management and Bitcoin Magazine Pro named Boreal, a market-neutral DeFi hedge fund, the winner of the Bitcoin Alpha Competition, awarding $1M in seed capital and access to Samara’s institutional infrastructure (Bitcoin Magazine)

• 100 Acre Ventures, a digital asset investment firm, formally announces the 100 Acre DeFi Opportunities Fund. The fund follows a long-only, rules-based, index-like strategy, offering spot exposure while actively staking and participating in governance (William Peets)

• Wincent, a multi-strategy crypto fund, gained 43% in 2024, boosting its AUM from $250M to $600M by year-end (Financial News)

• Druid Ventures and ARK Investment Management launch the ARK Digital Asset Innovation Fund, focusing on pre-seed and seed investments in visionary founders building transformative digital asset companies and protocols (Chris Pizzo)

• Two Prime Digital Assets grows its total AUM across SMA vehicles to $600M and issues $860M in BTC-backed loans in 2024 (TwoPrime)

• MV Capital, the investment arm of MV Global, announces VC Fund II with a maximum target size of $100M (MV Global)

• In the Liquid Fund Outlook 2025 Report, more than 60% of liquid crypto fund respondents reported that they expect to receive material capital contributions from their LPs before the second half of Q2 2025 — Powered by Crypto Insights Group (CIG)

• Former Cypher Capital executive Vineet Budki has launched Sigma Capital, a $100M fund with $40M in pre-commitments. The fund aims to actively manage liquid tokens, leverage high-yield DeFi strategies, and invest in high-growth crypto venture funds.(Reuters)

• Fred Desobry, former CIO of GAM Systematic, joins Bastion Asset Management, a global crypto focused alternative investment manager, as CIO (Bastion Asset Management)

• Parataxis Capital, a $150M multi-strategy investment firm, acquires Strix Leviathan, a $20M crypto quant hedge fund, and plans further acquisitions to reach $500M AUM by the end of 2025 (Bloomberg Law)

• Hypersphere Ventures shuts down its $130M multi-manager liquid fund, Atlas, launched in mid-2024, according to several anonymous sources (Hypersphere)

• Trump Media (DJT) launches Truth.Fi, expanding into FinTech with plans to invest up to $250M of its $700M reserves via Charles Schwab in SMAs, ETFs, and crypto (Stock Titan)

• Swiss-based Balfour Capital Group, a $400M AUM boutique investment firm, reports a 62.8% first-year return for its Solaris Fund, an algorithmic Crypto/ETF Income and Growth Fund (Balfour Capital Group)

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