Wall Street's Migration To Crypto Continues: Former Bain Manager Opens LatAm Bitcoin Fund
It appears a trend is taking shape. Following a former Goldman HFT trader's massive initial coin offering, another Wall Street-er has come to the dark side of virtual currencies. A former senior manager at consulting firm Bain & Company, is launching a Bitcoin fund, providing access to the cryptocurrency to some of the wealthiest families in Latin America.
Announced today, the newly formed Crypto Assets Fund, co-founded by former senior manager at Bain, Roberto Ponce Romay, is helping to raise $50m with the purpose of buying cryptocurrencies for family offices. Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Crypto Assets Fund (CAF) will invest directly in bitcoin, ether, zcash, ripple, litecoin and dash. As CoinDesk reports,
The first tranche of the fund, estimated to be valued about $10m, is in the final stages of closing, and is expected to be announced by the end of this month.
In interview, Romay explained that the purpose of the fund was two-fold.
First, it was designed to give investors in some of Latin America’s more unstable economies a new way to hedge their investments, and...
Second, it was meant to provide the opportunity to safely learn about these new stores of value for possible future investments.
According to Romay, as the fund's investors are becoming increasingly familiar with the crypto-asset class, the CAF could eventually raise new funds that also include tokens sold as part of initial coin offerings, or ICOs.
"This fund is investor driven," said Romay, who is now the director of investment banking boutique, Invermaster. "It is a simple strategy to give access."
"The [investors] wanted to be exposed..."
Investment documents provided to CoinDesk further reveal details about how the British Virgin Islands fund intends to invest capital provided by its limited partners.
Based on previous growth trajectories of CAF’s crypto-assets, the fund lists a minimum target return of 26% per year for three years with an "expected" target return of 71%.
With volatility at record lows across so many asset-classes, is this the beginning of an exodus from Wall Street to Cyber street to take advantage of information-edges and noise?
