Other industry highlights:

• Tiger Fund Inspired L/S Fund Targets 9-Figure AUM — Sees 20X Bump in AUM Since 2023 Launch

• Breed VC Teases Fund II — 30% of “Portcos” in Fund I See Markups

• M31 Capital and Omnichain Capital Merge, Forming Leading Web3 Investment Fund

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^{🗞 Allocator Developments 🗞}

$2.5B Crypto Native Family Office Appoints new CEO – Apeiron Investment Group, the Malta-based family office of tech investor Christian Angermayer, appoints Van Nuland, former Head of Proprietary Investments, as CEO. Apeiron keeps offices in Malta, Abu Dhabi, London, Berlin, New York and the Bahamas. The FO has backed Samara Asset Group, a crypto FoF seeing emerging managers.

$75M VC FoF Undergoes Restructuring— Nico Rosberg, Former F1 world champion turned Entrepreneur, adds $75M VC FoF to his existing serial angel investing. The fund has closed around $30M since launching a year ago and has exposure to blockchain investments

$70M Multi-Manager Brings on former CIO of +$300B Asset Manager — ML Tech brings on Paul Zemsky, former CIO of the Multi-Asset Strategies and Solutions Team (MASS) at Voya Investment Management, as Strategic Advisor. ML Tech will leverage Paul's insights on the intersection of tradFi and crypto.

$40M AUM FoF Actively Allocating – SyzCrest Digital, the crypto FoFs arm of the $2.2B independent alternative investment specialist, Syz Capital, is seeking to allocate to crypto arbitrage, long/short quant and special situations strategies.

Evergreen Growth appoints new Head of Crypto – The Singapore-based family office has named Hayden Hughes, co-founder of Alpha Impact and advisor to Antler, as its new Head of Crypto Investments. The firm invests in quant and fundamental funds.

$50M Multi-Manager sees new Inflows — Monex Group allocates $7.5M to 3iQ Global Cryptoasset Fund’s multi-manager platform, QMAP. QMAP invests in managers trading long biased, long/short, quant, relative value, and event driven strategies.

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🔥 What’s Hot in Crypto 🔥

M31 Capital and Omnichain Capital Merge, Forming Leading Web3 Investment Fund

M31 Capital, the long-running digital assets investment firm co-founded by crypto veteran Nathan Montone alongside Bridgewater alum Michael Swensson, recently finalized its merger with liquid token fund Omnichain Capital, which now operates within the firm’s liquid Web3 Opportunity Fund. David Attermann, the founder of Omnichain Capital, is now a Senior Portfolio Manager for M31 Capital, overseeing all liquid and illiquid Web3 investments for the firm. Attermann (who is fairly active on Substack) previously worked in venture capital, hedge funds and investment banking, before finding Bitcoin in 2014.

M31 Capital has also recently expanded into the Middle East, with local entities now in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and are in the process of setting up operations in Saudi Arabia. The moves are indicative of its long-term vision: there are significant capital reserves in the region ready to be paired with a shifting focus towards next-generation technologies like blockchain and AI.

M31 Capital, with an estimated $100M in total AUM, has a strategy going all the way back to Montone’s holding of Bitcoin in 2011, before setting up Bitcoin mining operations in 2014 and continuing since to focus on the development of DeFi and Web3-related applications and underlying infrastructure. The firm’s first fund opened to outside investors in 2020, generating 2,415% in its first few years of operation. Its most recent fund, focused primarily on Web3 technologies, has posted a 375% return since 2023. Prior to the merger, Omnichain Capital demonstrated strong performance as well, achieving a 204% return in 2023 and a 270% return over the last twelve months ending March 31.

Given the firm’s deep technical focus and comfort holding contrarian views, M31 Capital was early to many of today’s top narratives, such as decentralized compute, Web3 AI, and DePIN. Some of the fund’s biggest winners were unpopular bets at the time on Chainlink, Akash, Stacks, Render and Synternet (fka Syntropy). Looking forward, the team is excited about infrastructure advancements like coprocessors and TEEs, investing in projects like Aizel and Blockless that are well-positioned to outperform.

Looking ahead, M31 Capital outlines a roadmap that includes continuing its industry-leading performance, investor and portfolio events in the Middle East aimed at integrating the firm’s technology portfolio into the region’s public infrastructure, and a focus on nurturing junior talent in research and investment across the globe.

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Breed VC Teases Fund II — 30% of “Portcos” in Fund I See Markups

In just a little over a year, Breed VC is considering launching its second fund after observing markups in 30% of its portfolio companies, with a 60X return on the books.

Breed VC is the namesake of co-founder Jed Breed, a crypto veteran who was previously Head of Digital Assets for Circle, where he helped launch USDC (the second-largest stablecoin by marketcap). Breed began mining in 2013, first Bitcoin and later Dogecoin, and around the same time was an evangelist for the Ethereum whitepaper in its earliest days. He has been an angel investor since 2016, making him exceptionally well-networked in the crypto space and providing deep deal flow and outsized returns for fund allocations, of which there were 15 last year.

LP's in Breed Fund I include partners from Multicoin, Castle Island Ventures, Polychain, Variant, CMS, and Tribe Capital, along with early employees from Circle, Uniswap and Figment.

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Tiger Fund Inspired L/S Fund Targets 9-Figure AUM — Sees 20X Bump in AUM Since 2023 Launch

Despite launching in a turbulent market April 2023 after the Q1 bull run, Black Lotus Capital has experienced exponential growth, increasing their AUM from just under $1M to almost $20M within a year. While a third of the AUM growth came from institutional capital flows, the majority of their growth was due to high risk-adjusted returns and minimizing market drawdowns.

Their institutional-grade, long/short strategy focuses on long-term outperformance regardless of market conditions. They target +33% net-long exposure, but hedge their high conviction longs with shorts on the “worst of the worst” tokens that they see trending towards zero. This allows them to maintain long exposure to altcoins that can produce over 10-100x compounded returns over time, while hedging out the majority of the beta, drawdown and volatility risk with their short hedges.

Their two main differentiators are fundamental research and systematic risk management. The fund utilizes a bottom-up approach to investing, driven from the team's extensive experience in traditional finance and crypto. Black Lotus conducts primary and secondary research, and built proprietary data analytics infrastructure, researching and tracking hundreds of projects with the aim of discovering tokens that have a clear path to sustainable 1) widespread adoption, 2) strong competitive moats, and 3) token value capture.

The fund’s debut performance, posting a net 106% return with its biggest down month at -2.6%, is a clear substantiation of their framework’s effectiveness. They are now actively looking to strengthen their LP base into pension funds, endowments and larger institutions, with the goal of achieving $100M AUM by year end.

With respect to their traditional finance experience, Black Lotus Capital is a legacy from the “Tiger Cub” long/short relative value equities model, of which they've adapted the rigorous, fundamental-based approach, bringing traditional shorting best practices to crypto investment management. The fund sees itself as a leader when it comes to properly risk-managed, institutional-grade hedge funds operating in the digital assets space.

Andrew Woodruff serves as Co-Founder & Chief Investment Officer. He began his career at J.P. Morgan in global emerging markets before helping lead the early stage build out of digital assets research at a multi-billion dollar top tier hedge fund. Andrew launched Black Lotus with three other GPs who also have extensive institutional finance and crypto investment research experience, and have added three new hires as they scale their operations, research and fundraising endeavors.

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Dubai Based Quant Fund Secures $100M Ticket For Cash Management Strategy

ANB Investments, which began as a quant fund operating in traditional markets before pivoting to crypto, has secured an additional $100M in AUM for its cash management strategies, which it will manage through fixed-income instruments. The firm also announced it is upgrading its trading framework to accept Bitcoin and US dollars as the currency denomination for its L/S quantitative strategy and rejuvenating its delta neutral strategy after pausing it last year due to suppressed volatility.

ANB pivoted amid the decreased volatility, liquidity, and interest rates of 2023 by adjusting its L/S quantitive algorithm to enhance its resilience in low-volatility and low-interest-rate environments, while still effectively navigating market fluctuations. The optimizations are designed to favor longer term trades, decreasing monthly turnover. The strategy’s goal is to produce uncorrelated returns to bitcoin, producing positive performance in both bull and bear markets.

Additionally, ANB reintroduced its delta neutral strategy, which involves arbitraging perpetual futures across crypto exchanges, after seeing increased performance due to a pickup in volatility in crypto markets. “The environment for raising capital is much better now than it was three months ago,” says Iñigo de Diego, ANB’s Chief Operating Officer. “We’re seeing crypto-native asset managers beginning to allocate.”

ANB Investments was co-founded in 2016 by Jaime Baeza, who began his career as a trader for Credit Suisse. For most of the first four years it pursued a successful strategy of algorithmic trading in traditional forex, commodities and indices markets, before shifting, in Q3 2020, its trading focus to crypto. The shift yielded results that surpassed widely the ones obtained in traditional finance. The firm’s hedge fund followed in 2021, in order to bridge the gap between traditional finance and crypto with strict risk management and security policies.

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🍿 Blockchain Bytes 🍿

• Quinn Thompson, recently Head of Capital Markets and Growth for Maple, launches Lekker Capital, a crypto hedge fund utilizing macro analysis to make investments in liquid tokens and digital asset-related securities (Quinn Thompson)

• Crypto venture firm Paradigm seeks to secure war-chest of $750-850M AUM for its new fund, less than three years after historic $2.5B raise (PYMNTS)

• Galaxy Digital launches Galaxy Ventures Fund I LP, a $100M VC fund specializing in early-stage startups — The firm is looking to invest in about 10 new companies per year for the next three years (Coindesk)

• Former BlockTower employees launch Neoclassic Capital to bridge Western crypto enterprises with markets in Asia investing in onchain real-world assets, entertainment, gaming and social. — LPs include Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon and Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik (Crypto.news)

• Maven 11 Capital secures $120M for its second fund, which will take aim at DeFi and crypto infrastructure projects. Notable investments include Maple Finance and dashboard company Zapper (Yahoo Finance)

• King River Capital, gaming company Immutable and chain operator Polygon Labs form "Inevitable Games Fund (IGF), a $100M fund to bolster the crypto gaming sector (Coindesk)

• Triton Liquid Fund spins out of $260M AUM FJ Labs embracing a “quantamental” liquid approach to investing — FJ Labs has deployed $23M into the fund (Fabrice Grinda)

• “Industry Shake-ups” — David Scicolone, tradFi veteran, exits multi-strategy crypto fund Lavaliere Capital Management and joins $200M AUM Promontory Technologies as Director of Fund Raising & Investor Relations (David Scicolone), Gerald Brant ditches BlockTower after one year and joins CMT Digital as Head of Capital Formation (Gerald Brant) and Roy Tse departs Samara Alpha Management as former CRO (Roy Tse)

• Animus Technologies, an AI Powered Quant Fund managing $6M via SMAs, launches Fund I targeting $50M in AUM (Animus Technologies)

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