Hunting Hill Digital (HHD), a New York-based traditional finance hedge fund supported by an undisclosed investment from early-stage venture capital firm BaseLayer Ventures, announced on Wednesday that it will launch its digital asset affiliate. Hunting Hill Global Capital is a traditional finance hedge fund with $364 million in assets under management as of a March filing.
According to a person with knowledge of the situation, Hunting Hill Digital’s first product will debut later this year with the introduction of the Crypto 25 Fund, which will initially have $20 million to $25 million in assets under management.
The fund, which will give institutional investors exposure to an actively managed strategy focusing on the top 25 cryptocurrencies by market value, liquidity, and performance, is being created by HDD in collaboration with anchor investor TIFF, the person added.
The launch of the new digital asset business coincides with a persistent bear market that has significantly hampered investments in the sector. Hunting Hill points to the move’s appeal to institutional investors and the possible benefits of actions taken during a downturn as justifications.
According to Adam Guren, co-founder of HHD and chief investment officer at Hunting Hill, “We are contrarian traders by nature and we look for these types of distressed dislocations and believe that there is an opportunity when those occur.” “These are the moments when we want to be planting seeds to watch them grow later.”
Once that transfer is complete, HDD will eventually oversee all of Hunting Hill’s digital asset offerings, including the Hunting Hill Crypto Opportunities Fund. The affiliate, which will be run by Guren and co-founder Sonny Dozier, seeks to investigate tokenization and non-fungible token (NFT) asset management.
Hunting Hill was founded in 2012 as an asset management that catered to institutional clients, then in 2016, it expanded into digital assets. About $3.5 billion of the company’s balance sheet was earmarked for trading digital assets and their derivatives by the year 2021. According to Guren, Hunting Hill began to lessen that exposure as a result of warning signs regarding counterparty risks in the sector. As a result, the business was less vulnerable to the bankruptcies and insolvencies that shook the sectors.
Blockworks broke the news about Hunting Hill Digital for the first time in December. The new affiliate encountered some early controversy when CNBC reported that three former Genesis executives were claiming to be HDD co-founders and touting a Bessemer Ventures investment, which the investor denied. Genesis was a cryptocurrency lender and CoinDesk sister company that filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.
Hunting Hill later revealed to The Daily Beast that although the company had talks with two of the former Genesis workers, they had not yet begun employment. Martin Garcia, the third, served as HDD’s chief investment officer until May 1, a source informed CoinDesk.
