Introducing Wolverine Blockchain

Formerly Wolverine Crypto Trading

Wolverine Blockchain: 2018–19

2017 marked a historic year as we launched Wolverine Crypto Trading, the first student-led digital asset investment fund in the world at the University of Michigan. With ~$20,000 AUM (assets under management), students were able to individually manage portfolios of $1,000 each and invest in the dynamic, global markets for digital assets.

As the school year comes to an end, the team has come to the agreement that our current branding did not accurately portray our club’s priorities. Thus, in order to better reflect our focus on discussion and education around the underlying blockchain/distributed ledger technology, we have agreed to re-brand our organization to Wolverine Blockchain for the foreseeable future.

Why the change?

This decision comes after careful thought and consideration about our organization’s mission. From day one, we have always been most excited about the opportunity to bring together a multi-disciplinary group of students to discuss the implications of a new technology.

Working closely with the Michigan Ross School of Business and the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, we pushed ourselves to include an “action-based” learning component. In theory, maybe we could learn more about the technology and this new asset class by actually being invested/using real capital.

We recognized from an early stage that many digital assets were receiving valuations that far outweighed their inherent value-add to societies. In other words, we felt that speculation and FOMO (“fear of missing out”) drove a majority of the large bull run we saw in late 2017.

Though our capital model played an integral role in attracting the brightest students from across the university, we have concluded that there was not enough added-benefit to warrant such an extensive capital base moving forward. Rather than continue our club-wide investment initiative, we will instead be launching an investments-research driven project team within Wolverine Blockchain. This team will develop investment theses, evaluate potential valuation methodologies, and apply analyses to real investment decisions with real capital.

Our true value for our community

Across the board, we have agreed that the bulk of our value gained from WCT has been from:

• The ability to take complex topics and explain them to others in a ELI5 fashion (explain like I’m 5)
• Our weekly discussions (once a week, we meet for 1.5 hours to discuss current events in the space and diversified applications of blockchain/distributed ledger technology)
• Our “Town Halls” (once a month, we open our doors and host mass-scale events open to the entire community)
• Our Blog Posts (each member writes about a topic of their choosing 1x/month)

So in reality, the re-brand is more a re-affirmation of our original goals and mission.

I look forward to working closely with the team to take Wolverine Blockchain to new heights next year. We will open applications for interested undergraduate students in early Fall 2018. More information will be made available on our website throughout the summer at www.wolverineblockchain.org.