Investors Speak: DTI Capital
Evgeny Volfman — partner in the algorithmic hedge fund DTI Capital, specializing in trading stocks and shares. The fund invests in hi-tech projects at their early development stages. Having invested in Telegram ICO earlier this year, they have also contributed to Boomstarter.Network.
How did you come to the blockchain, and what do you do in the field now?
I’ve been into advertising for 12 years and founded three ads agencies. Then I took up the gold and pawnshops market. We bought a scrap of gold from the pawnshops for further recycling and selling. We also attracted investments for an increase in turnover. Having carefully studied the Russian market, we’ve found the “blue ocean,” that is the pawnshops lending. The most challenging part here was to convince banks and institutional investors to give credits to pawnshops, as the least could not secure the loan.
At the beginning of 2017 with ICO development, we found Goldmint, which objective was to create a vending machine to audit a pawnshop’s pantry. We called it custody bot, cause the device could tell the quality of a gold item by itself and then transmit the information via blockchain so that we had an opportunity to credit the pawnshop on bail for the data of the items.
We had ICO in September 2017 and collected $7000000. At the end of spring, I became the head of DTI fund that invests in ICOs. We review and estimate about 50 projects every month, and invest in little of them.
Why did you invest in Boomstarter?
We invested in Boomstarter because it is based on an existing business. We believe in crowd economics, this professional team and the power of management.
Alex Butmanov, chairman of the board: “Our research has shown that a lot of teams that raise fund via crowdfunding don’t want to be chained by excessive regulation. Borderless crowdfunding will become an effective instrument for testing the demand for future products. There’s a very high chance that Boomstarter.Network will become a global company due to long-term experience in this field”.
What do you think about ICOs and the falling market?
There is a tendency now that projects’ fundraising is very poor, few reach the soft cap and can expect to implement the project. Even the good ones attract enough money despite the high-quality product and the team. Ethereum exchange rate only hampers the fundraising; people are afraid to enter projects because of that. There are a lot of investors who gave up on this investment segment.
Perhaps, we’ll see the growth on the market by the end of the year. ICOs and venture investments, as I see them, will move towards the “Meeting on the Elbe.” The legal regulation will come, with security tokens and STOs — Security Token Offerings. With tokens, the company will sell equity as well, so that the contributor owns not only wrappers but only the company’s share so that the company’s income would be re-allocated in favor of an investor. It is probable that it’ll be easier for people to become a qualified investor but with less income to have an opportunity to participate in an ICO.
Tell us please about any case when you’ve lost the money you invested. Did it teach you anything?
Frankly speaking, I didn’t have any trading experience, but I have some history with mining. Me and my friends bought video cards; I consequently transferred the mined ETH into BTC. The rate was 10 ETH per 1 BTC last fall, which was very lucky.
The most expensive bitcoin I’ve ever bought was $9200. And the biggest mistake was not to fix it on $16000–17000 rate. Everybody thought the market would continue to grow. The market is really volatile, and one should not make drastic decisions, the bit should have a strict trading plan. If you enter the crypto to earn, you should bear in mind the exit point, so that when your income grows and the amount of the money invested becomes more significant, you have a decision when to exit and fix the profit. If you don’t do so, a collapse may occur, and you may not earn anything. Let it be small profit, but the fixed one, and then you can enter somewhere else.
Blockchain can be like the internet earlier. A lot of web pages emerged, but they didn’t succeed. The one thing that left are some giants like Google. That’s why I think the industry itself will develop, but no one knows what will happen with the particular exchange rates.
