On The Brink with Castle Island - Jeff Park (Bitwise) on Active Management in Crypto (EP.367)

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Jeff Park, an active Portfolio Manager at Bitwise joins the show. In this episode we discuss: The state of active crypto asset management. How Bitwise approaches the active management opportunity. The taxonomy of strategies that Jeff observes in the market. Perspectives on MEV and other crypto specific opportunities. The institutional LP landscape for active management vs. passive. To learn more about Bitwise visit bitwiseinvestments.com and see their announcement of new active strategies.

Today on the podcast, I sat down with Jeff Park, who oversees active portfolio management at Bitwise. Bitwise recently announced their expansion into active management, and so I want to get Jeff on the podcast, talk about what that means. On this podcast, we talked about active taxonomy. We talked about the infrastructure that is emerged to support active portfolio management. And we also talked about some of the new things that are happening on chain that present opportunities for active managers. This one was a lot of fun. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Jeff Park at BITW. it was. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guest and hosts may maintain positions in the assets

discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, IG $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage

giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. So Jeff, thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast. Thanks, Matt.

I'm excited to be here. We've had quite a few Bitwise people over the years. We've had Hunter. We've had Teddy. That was one of our all-time episodes. Talked about Supi. And we've, of course, had Matt, but excited to have you on finally. Yeah, I don't know if I could top any of the Supi anecdotes.

I'll do my best. But yeah, super excited to be here and talk through the expansion of all the things we're building here at Bitwise. Well, you've joined Bitwise in quite an exciting year. So I guess you've been with the firm for about nine months now. But talk a little bit about your role at the firm and how you got here. Sure. So I am a portfolio manager at BitWise, spearheading the development of our actively managed

strategies and offerings. I have a really interesting history, I suppose, career-wise, from traditional finance into crypto asset management, more broadly speaking, and some unique touch points to BitWise affirm in itself. So maybe I'll just start from the very beginning and walk you through. Much like you Matt, I started my career in traditional finance. I graduated from Stanford in 2008, and after having done internships across investment banking and sales and trading, I really fell in love with the capital markets and really liked this idea of having a daily score card you're given at the end of the day in which you get to participate in the exciting dynamism of public markets. And so I joined Morgan Stanley as an exotic derivatives trader.

And of course, 2008, as you know, was right before the great financial crisis. So it was an interesting time to have a lens towards that industry at that point in time. But for those who don't know, exotic derivatives trading really is about trading highly complex options that are outside the scope of black shules. So we're really talking about options that have some payoff functions that are very path dependent in ways that leverage stochastic volatility modeling and things that ultimately speak to the fact that not all asset prices are really distributed in a long, normal fashion, tail risks ultimately is what we're trying to price for. So when I learned about Bitcoin for the first time in 2010, I think in a way, I was primed to really maybe understand that

most people may not fully appreciate the tail risks for what an asset class this could be, and I was fascinated by it. So even though I would have purchased my first Bitcoins until a few years later after that with the launch of Coinbase in 2013, I had always kind of thought this was a fascinating subject matter. In 2014, I made my own personal venture investment as well. It was a Y Combinator-Bacted Bitcoin ATM operator based out of Canada, I think that actually shows you also how much the story of crypto has changed since eight years ago. And I think in 2015, a year later is when I met this at the time relatively unknown scrappy fund called Pantara here in New York and Paul Verdad etiquette who had maybe just joined about a year ago to really kind of spearhead some of the

venture investing efforts. For me, that was kind of a wake-up call to the realization that we're moving on to a different narrative outside of just Bitcoin being a store of value into some amazing things around legal contracts and smart computer programming. And in 2017, at my prior firm, Corbyn Capital, I spearheaded our digital asset investing efforts there. So Corbyn Capital, we were a $10 billion alternative asset manager, really focused on alternative strategies and traditional assets. But crypto is something that was a focus point of mind. And at that point, met with a variety of different managers in this space, really trying to think about what's the best way to invest. So I met with polychain and metastable and scalar capital, some of some of these OG folks in the space,

and eventually had the great privilege to source a manager called electric capital, which you probably know is led by H.L. Guardian, Kerr Spencer, who I had a pleasure to know through some of the Stanford connections from my past life. And since then, at Corbyn, we did a bunch of different venture investing, directly, some credit investing, touched upon some of the SPAC opportunities, as you might have followed in the past few years. And ultimately, one of the venture investments distributed eth in kind in a way that then kickstarted, all right, what is our strategy going to be to thinking about the infrastructure required to really fully participate in the digital asset value capture?

And in 2021, canvas the landscape once more broadly into looking at the liquid trading strategies that are now being afforded five years later. During the same time, someone informed me about Bitwise's interest in coming into the actively managed space. And because I've known of Bitwise through the common touch point of electric capital, this was something that immediately kind of captured my attention as to the possibility of what Bitwise can bring forth. Because, you know, I fundamentally believe that to build something out as monumental,

as actively managed strategies, the ability to leverage authentically a crypto-native mission that can utilize all the infrastructure is required to do it properly was pretty paramount. and that such a product could only really come from a forward-looking institution like a bitwise. That makes a ton of sense. I mean, it's been such an interesting industry from an asset management perspective because venture is a feature of this market, obviously, since the very early days. And I'd say passive liquid exposure has been as well with firms like Bitwise really being at the leadership position there.

But with your expansion into active, how do you even describe what that active opportunity set looks like? I mean, do you have a mental taxonomy for even what types of strategy? does you fall into that active bucket? Yeah, for sure. And the strategy taxonomy is ever-changing. It's changing based on so many different dimensions and factors across how we should think about risk, how we should think about accessing some of the rails for such strategies

that are made available. But really, the first question I think we have to ask ourselves, before we even delve into it, is what do we mean when we talk about actively managed strategies? you know, what's the possibility of such a form factor in a diversified asset allocation model? And first and foremost, what comes to mind is minimizing volatility and beta and drawdowns and the ways that people expect alpha-driven strategies to be. Is that possible in crypto? And for a long time, I would have said the answer is no.

You know, when I began my search five years ago, as I've mentioned, a lot of it was venture-oriented. Those venture have embedded beta, as you could imagine. And even those awkwardly constructed hedge fund vehicles, more or less, were seeking similar exposures in liquid assets that were broadly correlated at that time. You know, what's changed now is that we do actually have an incredible ready infrastructure that has been created by the virtue of those venture investments five years ago. So Anchorage Digital was just an idea. Now, it's actually a federally chartered digital bank that I think I saw on the news today

is partner with Apollo to manage their assets. and digital assets. So we've come a long way. The other aspects of managing volatility and beta and drawdown means that there's some notion of capital efficiency and leverage that we have to think about in trading strategies. And in crypto in particular, that's been a little elusive until now as well. So earlier this year, ISDAQ committee actually onboarded, I believe Falcon X as their first primary member to thinking about the construct of derivatives in broadly what I would still consider

the most traditional framework. And more recently, we're seeing companies that are trying to offer prime broker's services like cross-margining and netting and lending activities, like a hidden road, for example. Again, that didn't exist a few years ago. So this goes back to, is active possible? And these are kind of the building blocks. The last point I would mention is, and this is what you were touching upon, is there enough diversification of strategies that come out of these building blocks to have enough internal dispersion? of strategies to create something multifaceted, uncorrelated, and really inherently diverse in nature. One of the best signals I've always known in the hedge fund industry, if you're tracking long,

short equity funds, is really look for internal dispersion because that's how alpha is generated. And the question now is, is that possible in crypto? I would argue, absolutely. And so what are some of those strategies? There are so many of these things that we can walk through. I think the easiest framework to really think through is thinking about beta at the core of market neutral strategies that don't leverage beta in any capacity. And then on the other side, alpha-driven strategies that have some embedded security selection engine as a participation

of performance to the upside as well as downside management. And I would say the market neutral side is possibly the most fascinating aspect of what is continually changing as an ecosystem. There are so many arbitrage and market making strategies that are made possible. There's different kinds of credit provisioning that is coming online in ways we're seeing flows between decentralized finance and centralized finance in ways that we have never seen before, especially given an environment now where interest rate is as high as it is in the traditional world. Event-driven trading opportunities where narratives are starting to take hold in

driving some of the price action that have built in reflexivity that others can watch and monitor and guide by. Quantummental strategies that are leveraging some aspects of intangible values towards valuation. And of course, liquid venture. I mean, crypto as an asset class is so unique because you're able to invest in venture-like assets that have public market liquidity in the ways that the systems are growing with you alongside not necessarily having to lock up your capital for 10 years. I mean, this is one of the unique hallmarks of crypto assets that I think a hedge fund

structure can capture efficiently away from traditionally a venture model. That makes a ton of sense. I mean, how do you think about just what it takes to win in the active phase? Do you think that we're talking about, hey, you need to be a crypto expert, you need to understand what the roadmaps are for these public protocols? or do you imagine a world where you'll see generalists from equity world bring in strategies that have worked in other asset classes and just apply them to, say, centralized exchange trading and crypto and not need to even really know what's going on in some of these open

source communities? How do you think about that aspect of it? Yeah. That's such a great question. And the answer is, of course, varied depending on the strategy stuff that we're looking to. But I'll give you an example of a category that I think leverages traditional expertise and know-how very similarly in the way that it is parallel and carried over to crypto.

So one of those would be quantum systematic trading strategies. As I think most folks are aware, the crypto market is extremely volatile. It is extremely sentiment driven with embedded factors such as momentum, probably due to some outsized participation of retail during different moments in time that look different from institutional behavior. But those types of behavioral biases that we have come to know and appreciate in traditional finance is very much the same types of things that we're seeing in the crypto market as well. So the construct of an endowment effect, for example, where humans tend to have this

ability to assign higher values to items that they own, you know, to the same item which they might not own and therefore can create types of overshooting very much similar in crypto as it is in stocks, biases like disposition effects where, you know, people hold on to the losers and sell winners and they underreact to new information that makes them change your mind, those types of things, very much the same type of behavior we're seeing in crypto, as you would see in traditional assets, you know, bandwagon effects, the idea that you are following something because others are doing it, and it creates embedded momentum, those things all very much the basis of behavioral biases

and how we approach to space. What's really unique, though, in crypto is that so much of the second order, third order granularity of information is made available. in ways that you don't know in the stock market. So having some ability to leverage on-chain data to know what kinds of participants are actually behaving in certain ways is such a unique novel vector for information that you could almost imagine that even these traditional theories of psychology

can be studied at a much more higher fidelity now because you have so much more additional data and to the types of behaviors you're seeing of the underlying flow. So this is an example of something that I think is broadly intuitive to people being a traditionally similar alpha engine. But can there be evolution being done on top where you add an on-chain data analytics level and parameterize some of these things for additional alpha? Absolutely. And I do think that is an engine for some crypto-nitivity being required to access those types of proprietary data in the space. It seems like there must be such a surface area for net new things that you can do.

on top of these public chains that you couldn't do if you're trading equities? I mean, think about on-chain liquidity and think about on-chain yield. Think about MEV, which, you know, I guess if you want to use an analogy would be, you know, really understand like payment for order flow dynamics in an equity context, but now there's actually an opportunity to monetize some of that. So what are the most exciting things you're starting to see just within that on-chain and MEV world? And is that actionable in this climate? Yeah. So I think that they are actionable in ways that may not look the same as it did a few months ago as things continue to evolve in the space from an R&D perspective. But there are some things that are probably a little more persistent and evergreen in nature,

thematically speaking. And one of those I would say is the hybrid bridge between DFI and CFI liquidity. So as you can imagine, so many institutions who trade crypto are perhaps handcuffed in the ways they can access liquidity based on their own regulatory comfort or incumbency of your existing business. And therefore, there's this bifurcation of players that traffic in liquidity provisioning. If you are trying to put on a trade through a centralized entity, the funding rate for that could look different than if you were to do it on chain. And that's because there isn't a natural flow. So for a popular example, in the traditional side, going short tether was the thematic narrative that you may have seen across the news that a lot of hedge funds that are not crypto-native took interest in. So if you're trying to short tether using Falcon X, and that's kind of maybe the one directional flow people are seeing, the rate for borrow there is going to look very different than if you want to do that trade on ABE. So if you can actually bridge some of that liquidity as a crypto-native player, almost becoming a hybrid market maker across those flows, those are arbitrage opportunities where you can actually earn some outsized returns by taking market neutral exposures.

I think the way that people misunderstand liquidity on chain sometimes is that so much of it is driven by what are called automated market maker pools. And these are by definition not a central limit order book. And that, I think, is a novel frontier as to thinking about where arbitrage opportunities exist for the different points in which liquidity is provided for or not provided for. So even the ability to leverage some of those on-chain data in thinking about how uniswap v3 really works from the aspects of what concentrated liquidity means as a market maker starts to. to have some effects around trading strategies that look more like, as you described, what high-froquetry traders might be doing from an order flow and payment for order-full-type perspectives. Lastly, you mentioned MEP.

I think MVE arbitrage is going to continue to be a fascinating subject for a lot of people, and there will always be some debate as to the utility of it as to the development of our trading landscape, but the reality is it is a unique feature of how liquidity is provisioned in the space where even having experienced the merge most recently with Ethereum, the classic mev name, which stands for minor extractable value, is already outdated, right? It's no longer minor, it's oriented. Now, that profit is still going somewhere. It's going to folks who can actually think about the role of validators in an expedient way

where you could still participate in some of those opportunities. But I think that just shows you an example of, you know, what is the new mev on Ethereum versus the old mev, and who's going to be able to take advantage of that, and, you know, how flashbots is evolving over time to allow different types of mechanisms like the Proposer, Builder, separation. Those types of things, I think, will continue to be sources of alpha

for those who are able to stay ahead on the frontier of it. If you had recorded this conversation and shown it to, versions of ourselves five years ago, we would have both had no idea what we were talking about with this MEP stuff and on chain. So you have to love how fast this industry is going, that there's just net new categories that are popping up left and right. No, I think that's totally fair. I think we're so early still on thinking about how automated market making as a constant product function today that UNICEF has popularized may change too over time. There are other ways to think about the mathematical models of provisioning liquidity. And there are so many smart people working on

new defy primitives and paradigms of what that should look like algorithmically. And as long as people keep innovating, the beauty of such type of open source innovation is that anyone can glean into it and anyone can learn and be a part of staying one step ahead. I think that's the most fascinating aspects of why this alpha engine will continue to sustain itself over time. What looked like an opportunity last year in terms of the things people were doing is not the opportunity this year. and it won't be the opportunity next year.

But the folks who are able to traffic it thoughtfully will see that, you know, $35 trillion, none of the less traded last year in crypto, which is an astronomical number that five years ago, you and I both probably cannot have imagined. What's even more fascinating to that number is actually more than half of that 35 were derivatives. So these are not, you know, you and me buying Bitcoin or E on Coinbase. These are perps and calls and puts and swaps that institutional investors, as well as some savvy retail investors are trafficking. And I think that just shows you the market structure is continuing to evolve pretty dynamically.

Do you think the merge will have a big impact on just the generation of new types of financial products? And as a corollary, I guess, do you imagine that that will unlock new institutional participation just in terms of looking at Ethereum a little bit differently? I think yes. And I think we're already seeing signs of that. So Fidelity, I believe recently announced that they are offering services to, manage Ethereum, you know, for a long time, Fidelity has been probably the most conservative work in offering their custody services strictly for Bitcoin and really being a Bitcoin-centric

player. I think their foray into Ethereum is a signal. I think the fact that the CME group also is launching Ethereum calls inputs in ways that they had prior to the merge is another emblematic sign that institutions are interested in Ethereum. So why is that? I actually do think a part of it is that the merge does make Ethereum a more environmentally friendly asset. I do think that ESG as a construct is important for institutions. And for a long time, I've always argued that for crypto, even though the EE may have some penalties, you couldn't overlook the amazing jump that we're making on the S and the G front towards the economic freedom and the way that we're thinking about financial inclusion

at a global scale, those types of S&G are pretty meaningful too. Well, now you just solve the E as well. So there really is no more kind of case to thinking about what institutions could be held liable for by otherwise participating in something that could be unfriendly. I do think it is a moment. It also solidifies for the industry that proof of stake is here to stay. This too, I think, at some point, was a very controversial discussion point years back where people had so many different types of consensus mechanisms.

and ideas around it. And now I think, without a doubt, this is going to be the prototype of how most blockchains are going to bootstrap their network building activities. Yeah, it's going to be really interesting to see how that evolves on the institutional side. I mean, one thing I'd be curious to get your take on

is just how institutional allocators are thinking about open-ended products. I think historically, these have been really difficult for a lot of LPs to wrap their heads around because of the beta that you mentioned. So a lot of the earlier versions of these funds looked like basically venture funds. You know, they'd be buying liquid tokens and holding them for a long time. And so as a result, they would just draw it down in these unbelievable ways during bear markets.

And how is that changing? What are the conversations like with institutional allocators when you're kind of framing out this broader taxonomy of opportunities now? Yeah. So there are a few things that I always try to push a little bit on helping our, institution allocator friends challenge their conceptions around the assumptions that we make in this space. So we touched upon this a little bit, but the first I try to bring forth is this fundamental misconception of the illiquidity discount. I think because venture is a long-term illiquid investment, there is a notion that that illiquidity has to be compensated for by extra yield.

And traditionally that works in private equity, I think, versus some aspects of public equity, of course, depends on the trading strategy of public equities in a year like now. But in crypto in particular, I do think that the opportunity to earn outsized risk return in the short tenor of the curve is just as profound as the long term. So, of course, we all believe in this incredible innovation and revolution we're seeing around digital property rights and peer-to-peer, censorship-resistant functionality. decentralized social identity graphs. These are long-term bets.

They're all going to be on the right side of history. But the other side of the coin is that it's enabling a lot of these trading strategies that don't have to be necessarily directional. So I think what you're alluding to is that historically, a lot of these investments were directional in nature, where it was so correlated anyway to one benchmark that there wasn't a lot to do otherwise to feel like you were getting enough degrees of freedom

to make that pursuit worthwhile. And I think now we're at a point where that just simply isn't true. So if you're doing a MEV arbitrage strategy with world-class node infrastructure, that has nothing to do with the directionality of Bitcoin's price. That is in itself an economic endeavor, totally distinct for its own value creation mechanism. I think also the notion that traditional investors approach this world through this lens of assets generally being priced under the theory of general price equilibrium versus maybe George Soros' theory of reflexivity is an important one as well.

And to your point, crypto can be very volatile, right? These are assets that are north of 100, 150 ball in some cases, and they're cyclical, and there's Elliott waves embedded in it with fractal patterns that people can observe technically. But all of those things create distinct, creating operations. So one of the things that I always love hearing is institutions upon surveys, sometimes most often will say one of the gating factors of why we can't invest in crypto is volatility, right? But volatility, if you actually empower it the right way, can be an asset of its own. And in a year like this, where price would not have supported you, maybe even yields wouldn't have, because as you know, crypto yields come in a lot on the rails of defy, it's now below risk for. in the traditional world.

The one factor that actually has worked really well this year in crypto is volatility. If you have programmatically been able to sell calls and puts and straddles and strangles from deltas ranging from the moniness of 20 to 50, almost all of those strategies have generated extremely high yield. I think if you sold 50 delta strangles systematically over the year, I believe that strategy annualized over 100% this year. So this idea that volatility is your enemy can also be a challenge on the bucket of what is the point of an absolute return strategy.

And that, I think, is where institutions are starting to recognize there could be another vector for crypto alpha that is a totally distinct narrative from perhaps the one that we've grown up with for the past five years. These narratives are so interesting. And I'm curious your perspective on which narratives are the most strongly developed. in the LP community. I mean, from the venture perspective, we started in 2014-15 with just Bitcoin. And so you either had to believe Bitcoin was a payments disruptor or it was this venture bet on the emergence of something like digital gold. And a lot of people weren't willing to make that

bet. I'd say the launch of Ethereum and decentralized financial services gave a bigger surface area for, hey, we're talking about addressable markets that could look like the financial services world. We're talking about doing things more efficiently. We're talking about new category creation. And then, of course, you have this Web 3 decentralized internet architecture narrative, which is basically the entire internet, which I think a lot more people have gotten on board with. But as an investor into an open-ended product, do you need to even have a view on those things? Or are you just looking at inefficient markets that there's incredible asymmetries? Yeah. So I think that they're related to the extent that one opportunity begets the other.

So I think unless you continue to see innovations in ways that new primitives come online, those trading strategies that exist under it won't develop. And they too will become stale over time. So for example, I'll highlight the decentralized options protocols that has been around for years now where there hasn't still been a lot of attraction as to how people want to access the derivatives market on chain. But there's a lot of different technological progress being. made towards how to fix some of those bottlenecks.

So historically, one of them having been an Oracle functions around how to make sure that price is moving quickly and safely for levered instruments that otherwise could be manipulated, those types of things are going to come from the venture investments towards the infrastructure layer that permit additional trading strategies to come online. So I don't think it's wise to ignore one subset, just focusing on the other. Because it informs the other in its flywheel. And that's why it's really important to have a multi-strategy approach and mindset because the recognition of it isn't solely that, you know, one's right or one's wrong.

It's this idea that if you understand the implications and how they interplay against with each other, then there's a fuller set of a digital asset value capture framework that can exist, that a close-ended venture format in itself might be too restricting as the only kind to access those opportunities. That makes all the sense in the world. So you mentioned some of the advancements in infrastructure and the hidden roads of the world entering. Where do we stand just as an industry in terms of your ability to deploy these strategies

and do what you want to be doing? And I guess where do you see the need for additional development and R&D and venture capital funding for some of these infrastructure categories? Yeah. So one of the things that I find fascinating in crypto versus traditional is this construct of like SMAs, these separately managed accounts. In the traditional world, I think when we hear SMAs, the general driving force of what people want to use it is for transparency and maybe the ability to customize leverage.

But it rarely has to do with the aspect of like custody. That's not a driving focus as to why people want to use SMAs versus, you know, for example, commingled funds. In crypto, the SMAs that people want to access, their utilities can be wide-reaching. But at the same time, they are striking different kinds of partnerships to bring products to the marketplace in ways that we hadn't really seen as much on the traditional side. So I think a few years ago, one River partnered with Coinbase to thinking about an SMA approach to onboarding customers. Recently, Eaglebrook, I think also struck a partnership with Kathy Wood. She has with some other firms. And there's another Chicago-based company out there called ML Tech that's trying to bring SMA platform to quant trading strategies and providing access to those in a transparent way.

I think those types of distribution schemes and methods to onboarding additional customer flow into this asset class is pretty important. This may not be as sexy as building an on-chain distribution model of what a prime broker's could look like. But nonetheless, they are parts of the ways institutions think about coming into this space and the infrastructure that they need to leverage a play here. And I pay a lot of attention to the competitive landscape of the kinds of financial infrastructure that is bridging some of this gap. And I think it'll be a continued focus for Bitwise and the way we think about actively managed strategies. I couldn't agree more about the SMA space.

I mean, it's very clear that a lot of the people that built the first versions of crypto custodians just didn't contemplate SMA creation and some of the needs that as an institution you'd need from a custodian to have these separately managed accounts and to have good record keeping and, you know, trade execution flow through the various entities. So there's in some ways a lot of learnings from traditional financial services that will need to come into the crypto entrepreneur space in the years to come, I think. Yeah, for sure. You know, one of the amazing privileges I've had as part of my crypto journey really is I am part of a group called Chainforest. Chainforest is an investment Dow that is founded by an ex-Sannie a partner. And the whole

purpose is actually mobilizing some aspects of decentralization towards the role of labor and capital and how we can think about sourcing these types of opportunities into building all the different multifaceted infrastructure required in Web 3. Those types of ethos, I think, carries a long way for people to come into this space and thinking about what partnerships can even look like in crypto. That looks so distinct from the traditional world. That's really cool. So you've been in the seat for about nine months and you're becoming public now with this expansion into active. What's it been like to build this business on the inside of Bitwise? It's been a remarkable journey.

One of the things that I knew from the very beginning that has been now ascertained multiple times is that being a specialist in this space pays dividends. Bitwise in particular, I think, is not just a specialist for having been founded five years ago and navigating the space, providing access and research to all our investors. But we're also one of the few non-conflictive, singular purpose-driven asset management firm. We have no other business besides asset management. And I think there is something to be said about the importance of transparency and being singularly focused for clients that continue to serve asset managers well over time.

And we're really professionally bridging that gap between TradFi and Crypts, Donative, you know, before I joined, one of the things that really I took such an immense liking to for Bitwise's thought leadership was the NFT Index Fund. That launched last year and in a way, I think, set the tone for how important it is that you think about frontier of what investors may want to find exposure to that may not have been obvious at the time and as narratives develop. But here we have this incredible blue chip NFT index fund that applies what I think is still one of the most thoughtful ways in terms of methodology to thinking about how such an index should be calculated and weighted and rebalanced into investing in NFTs. I think that's super cool. And above all, the people that you work with is the most important factor in the authenticity. We're driving a mission.

And, you know, even going back to my original touchpoint with Avichal five years. ago alongside Hunter, you couldn't imagine that there would be anyone else who can enthuse this mission beyond the way that Bitwise has been such a champion for. And that all has been to and exceeding all my expectations, the team that we've been able to build out. So folks that I've been wanting to have joined work with us have all been excited and eager, and they're raising their hands to leave Trat Fai and come here. We hired a head of operational due diligence, very seasoned professional from Northern Trust, Vin Molino, who also headed the operations activities at Mercer and Permal. And we also had a risk specialist named Denny from Millennium,

who also had some time at Black Rock. I mean, these are well-seasoned professionals, excellent in their individual endeavors. All it do is by the mission to bring that practice over here on behalf of Bitwise. And that's been a real privilege to see. That's awesome. Well, you guys are doing a great job. And I know you have quite a few open recs and are hiring fast. So where can we send people to learn more about the active side of Bitwise? Our website will have a dedicated effort towards having an institutional landing page. So I would highly recommend our website as a good starting point. But we also have 20 plus people on the business development side who is ready to reach and assist in any endeavors

where it made possible. So I would also encourage anyone who's interested to learn more to just reach out to us and we'll be able to come back to you and continue the conversation. Awesome. Well, it was great to have you on today, Jeff. Thanks for taking time. Thanks for having you, Matt. Look forward to the next. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. Visit castle island. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On thebrink dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening. Thank you.