Exploring Web3 Finance

I started investing in Bitcoin and alternative coins in 2014 while working at a mutual fund. I was one of a handful of people at the company who were exposed to Bitcoin. The Associate Vice President of Investments Management Technology and I discussed offering a crypto product to clients but found that the market cap was too small, and mutual funds were too heavily regulated, so we would never get approval. Years later, I was happy to discover the emergence of DeFi.

While working on the Mix3d community I had several friends and family ask, what Cryptocurrencies they should invest in. Besides legal reasons, I try to avoid giving any financial advice because novice investors act on emotion and are inconsistent. I have considered launching a fund several times, and DeFi presented an opportunity to create a strategy without any organization becoming the custodian of the funds. I found Token Sets and put together a strategy on the Polygon network to minimize trading fees while having access to most tokens. The strategy is weighted by market cap and includes all of the currencies that I thought would be crucial to the development of Web3.

While Token Sets is an incredible tool, ultimately I was unsure of the legal implications and did not want to take the leap of being responsible for the funds of family and friends. Luckily, I did not move forward because LUNA imploded months later.

Institutional Web3 Investing

In late 2022, I was searching for my next role and applied to a firm that creates crypto indexes for ETF issuers. The firm asked me to put together an index, and I chose to create an index for smart contracts. I provided the document below, and it led me to the next round of the interview process. I was in the last rounds of interviewing for a few different companies and decided to accept an offer at another organization instead of continuing the interview process. Below is the strategy, and my rationalization for investing in a Smart Contract Index.