‘It’s Like SPY For Cryptos’: Meet The 3 Ex-Goldman Bankers Behind A Crypto Index Fund

Well, leave it to a trio of former Goldmanites to launch the first cryptocurrency index fund aimed at wealthy investors.

Crescent Crypto Asset Management is set to launch on January 1. The fund will tap accredited investors and aims to raise $50 million upon launch. Here are the three guys behind this:

So from left to right, that’s Ali Hassan, Christopher Matta, and Michael Kazley and as you can see, they are a combined 23 years old.

You can read about them here, but suffice to say they were all at Goldman at one time or another. Here’s what they’re trying to do with Crescent:

The Crescent 20 TM Private Index Fund seeks to replicate the performance of the largest cap, and most liquid cryptocurrencies in the world. The index will cover approximately 80% of the market cap of the entire crypto- universe, and will be rebalanced quarterly.

Got it. Here’s the weighting:

“This is as close to an ETF as one could get in the crypto space,” Hassan told FT this week, adding that “we’ve built out a product that mirrors the market to a high degree of correlation, without having to buy every currency in the market.”

According to the same FT piece, Hassan plowed his Goldman signing bonus into Bitcoin back in 2013 when it was trading at just $300 while Kazley apparently got screwed in the MtGox debacle.

These three amigos are using a “custody infrastructure” that “includes cold storage, multi-signature authentication, and redundancy controls” to make sure the coins your fund shares represent are secure.

Specifically, they’ve got themselves some “facilities at an undisclosed location in New Jersey.” So it’s like Area 51.

For fun, their website includes the following chart which serves to remind prospective investors about just how much upside they’ve missed out on this year by staying stuck in boring old stocks that have “only” risen 18%:

Hassan told FT that he wants to “do for cryptocurrencies what SPY did for the S&P 500.”

And look, if you’re an accredited investor with at least $100,000 to play with, you can join the revolution.

For the privilege, they’ll charge you 1% of AUM and 10% of gains, which sounds more like a hedge fund than an “index fund” to us.

But then again, we thought “Long Island Iced Tea” sounded like an iced tea company and it turns out we were wrong about that, so what do we know?