Photo: DARMA Capital / Medium
Yesterday, Andrew Keys announced that he is moving from ConsenSys to DARMA capital as the newest managing partner. He joins James Slazas, the former head of capital markets at ConsenSys. At the same time, he stays at ConsenSys at the advisory board.
DARMA (Digital Asset Risk Management Advisors) capital is a CFTC-regulated firm with approximately $100 million in assets under their management. These are the funds of the high-net-worth accredited investors which are meant for the Ethereum “Optimized Long fund”.
However, this Ethereum long position doesn’t stop at just being a long-term investment. The main idea for this Ether long-run is to accumulate more Ethereum. Andrew Keys revealed that his goal is to accumulate 1 percent of the total funds per month.
“So if you gave me 100 ether, my goal would be to produce 1 ether a month,” Keys says.
He explains that this is no “hodling”. Ultimately, their plan is to spot the market “highs” and “lows” in order to accumulate more digital assets.
Moreover, Keys has long been rooting for Ethereum. In 2018 he did an interview at the Economic Forum at Davos where he said:
“We will have a decentralized World Wide Web, and it will impact every aspect of our humanity. I’m going to be able to have peer-to-peer transactions with counter parties without a bank, or a Facebook, or an Uber, an Amazon, an eBay in the middle.”
DARMA Optimized Long-ETH Fund
Or in short – DOL-ETH, is a program which automatically manages investor digital asset portfolios. It is designed to identify the market cycles and not only hold the assets as such. Their main point is to “create alpha”, which is an investment strategy, which ultimately means to “beat the market” or spot the edge.
Moreover, the company already has plans for the upcoming future, as they won’t stop at an individual Ethereum Long fund. They are in the works to providing a Bitcoin in the upcoming months. However, an interesting decision is to offer a similar long fund on Filecoin. Andrew Keys explained that investors can expect this sometime next year:
“We believe [those tokens] will be the components of the next-generation internet and essentially there is a new asset class in what I would call crypto commodities. So we’re not interested at the application layer, we’re interested in the protocols that many different applications will use.”
Consensys and DARMA Will Work Together
As already mentioned, Keys transitioned from ConsenSys to working full time at DARMA, however, he will stay as an advisor at ConsenSys. Since Joseph Lubin founded Ethereum Foundation, their main field of operations is developing decentralized software services and applications that operate on the Ethereum Blockchain. ConsenSys has invested in DARMA in the past, and it will stay as an investor now.
Why DOL-ETH is Better Than Other Funds?
Keys explains that there’s a void in the market. He also believes that this Ether long fund is a simple solution and a necessary missing piece of the market.
“I think the investment stage, if you look at the PwC blockchain hedge fund report, over 70 percent of them have less than $10 million assets under management, half of them don’t use a custodian and it’s very immature. We have $100 [million] AUM, we have one of the best custodians in Opus, we have KPMG as an auditor,” explains Keys.
However, at the moment, only accredited investors, family offices and institutions can participate in this fund.
