Investor Spotlight #1 : LedgerPrime
In this series, we introduce a selection of our CeFi & DeFi partners to the Alkemi Network community and invite them to discuss why they chose to partner with our project. For our first spotlight, we invited Shiliang Tang of LedgerPrime to share his insights on Alkemi Network, bridging CeFi to DeFi and what the future holds for financial markets.
LedgerPrime is a quantitative hedge fund and market maker focused on the digital asset space. We have been actively pursuing DeFi specific strategies for over a year and have expanded to a portfolio of over 30 firms. Our focus is bridging our expertise as one of the largest market-makers in the derivatives industry to the DeFi world. We have been helping a number of large DeFi projects bootstrap early liquidity and experiment with go-to market strategies. As the CIO of the fund, I am responsible for allocating resources towards the different strategies we pursue. My team comes with substantial experience from the TradFi world. Our work primarily focuses on seeing how we can enable DeFi to transition towards a more mature market using the skill-sets and tools at our disposal.
What does ‘bridging CeFi to DeFi’ mean to you?
There’s three sides to this conversation. Bridging the two worlds requires capital, expertise, and infrastructure. In terms of infrastructure, we are enabling players like Alkemi that allow traditional, verified pools of capital from large organizations to interact with DeFi in a secure and compliant fashion. In terms of capital — we are working towards allowing more traditional pools of capital to enter the ecosystem directly. This occurs in the industry today either through infrastructure players or structured products. Lastly, in terms of expertise, we are creating an organization that can absorb the brightest minds in CeFi and enable them to build on DeFi. This is a common theme among the people we work with and invest in. For us, converging CeFi with DeFi means enabling the large tranches of capital that remains under-utilized in traditional finance to interact with DeFi in a meaningful fashion at scale.
What do financial markets look like in 5 & 10 years from now?
We are at an inflection point with finance. Trends will be largely similar to what occurred with the media or e-commerce in the early days of the web. Access is democratized, functions are decentralized and barriers to entry in terms of building are increasingly reduced. It is safe to say that in the next 5 years, we will see a natural explosion in the number of service providers for each category in the business to consumer face. It will not be surprising to see celebrity launched neo-banks or NFT focused yield-farms that are launched by music bands. Over ten years, these themes will be more regulated and value will accrue around a handful of niche players. This tendency for growth to go in all directions and then accumulate will be similar to what happened with music during the early days of Napster, Limewire, iTunes and then Spotify. Relationships and business-models will streamline and concentrate for efficiency.
How do you see Alkemi Network influencing the capital markets revolution?
Alkemi makes it possible for institutional sources of capital to connect with DeFi. This improves the ecosystem in two ways. One is by enabling relevant DeFi projects to find strategic sources of capital that can be value-add to the network. The other is by handholding traditional sources of capital towards allocating resources in the right pools. The two are basically a flywheel effect. As more traditional forms of capital go towards early stage networks, they will grow. This in turn attracts more traditional forms of capital. This is the value add Alkemi will bring to the world of DeFi.
How has your experience working in the digital asset markets impacted your view of the world?
DeFi has drastically reduced the barrier to entry for innovation in the capital markets. This means change and disruption can practically come from anywhere. We need to take seasoned wall-street veterans as seriously as 20 year old founders building their first venture. The classical notion of innovation occurring only in specific hubs needs to evolve to accommodate for what the world allows today.
Where can our community learn more about LedgerPrime?
You can start by following our Twitter. Our website will soon host a series of updates from us and the portfolio we have built over the past year. In case you are building an early stage DeFi venture — the fastest way to get to us would be to write to joel@ledgerprime.com
About Alkemi Network
Alkemi Network is an institution-grade liquidity network for financial institutions and individuals to access professional DeFi and earn yields on their Ethereum-based digital assets.
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