Since NASDAQ acquired Cinnober last year, blockchain lead Eric Wall has left the exchange business for a bitcoin investment fund, joining the Oslo, Norway-based Arcane Crypto, he told CoinDesk.
Aimed at high net worth Scandinavians and institutional investors globally, the fund is an investment branch of Arcane, a crypto firm running a technology team, trading arm and a crypto news portal Kryptografen.com.
Arcane Crypto CEO Torbjorn Bull Jenssen is a widely cited crypto expert in Norway and a white paper published earlier this year shows their team is watching the industry closely, but doesn’t provide any clues to the investment strategy.
Wall said that he could not disclose precisely which assets will be Arcane’s focus, but that outperformance separate from the revaluation of bitcoin would be the metric:
“I expect that the metric that really matters is how funds perform against bitcoin. Once the dust starts to settle on that, it’s going to be clear who’s been swimming naked.”
Some altcoin could also make it into Arcane’s portfolio, Wall hinted, but only those strictly selected:
“We are seeing a maturing trend in the altcoin market. It’s already very different now than it was a few years ago. It’s becoming harder and harder for technically inept projects to fake-it-til-you-make-it. There’s only in a very few, select areas in the cryptocurrency design space that has merit to compete against bitcoin.”
Rather than measuring performance against fiat, the goal is to trade digital currencies to increase the size of the portfolio, in bitcoin.
Arcane Crypto was founded by Norwegian investors Ketil Skorstad and Khristian G. Lundqvist, and also funded by Morten Klein, a poker player and chairman of the Swedish casinos company Cherry, in an undisclosed round this April.
All three investors are from Norway, hence the Scandinavian slant of the fund.
Wall had spent more than three years at Cinnober, a company selling tech solutions for stock and crypto exchanges, and was used to explaining crypto to people in traditional finance, but in English, not in Norwegian
“We will have a special focus on the Nordics, but it’s not exclusive,” Wall added.
Photo of Eric Wall by Enid Valu for the Lightning Conference