This week, ex-Citi head of structured products trading — Matt Zhang — announced the launch of his investment firm called Hivemind Capital. It has an initial venture capital pool of $1.5 billion to invest in blockchain, gaming, NFTs, and other digital assets.
"We believe blockchain technology is a paradigm shift, and we are still in the early innings. Our mission is to provide start-to-finish capital and infrastructure solutions to visionary entrepreneurs and category-defining crypto projects," said Matt Zhang, Founder and Managing Partner of Hivemind in an official statement announcing the venture.
Zhang went on to state that Hivemind will primarily invest in crypto companies, trade digital assets, and offer a first-of-its-kind, “play-to-earn” investment strategy within the gaming space. The firm will also invest capital in vertical channels such as crypto infrastructure, blockchain protocols, programmable money, and virtual worlds.
It’s been widely reported recently that both Citi and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) are seeking to hire hundreds of digital-natives and crypto veterans within their banking ranks to try and onboard a bolus of blockchain-centric institutional knowledge. Experts say “Big Banks” need to make these massive hiring rounds to help them evolve to a blockchain-based model to stay competitive in the crypto-focused future that’s coming. However, Zhang says the way they’re doing it is not going to work for them,
"The traditional asset management model is not designed to do this, which is why we are building a tailor made crypto investment platform from the ground up that also offers the infrastructure institutional investors need for risk management, compliance, and security." To help manage those expectations of institutional investors, Hivemind selected Algorand — a leading layer-1 blockchain — as its strategic partner to provide future-proof technology capabilities and network ecosystem infrastructure. Algorand’s next-generation applications make it the blockchain technology of choice for thousands of organizations launching NFTs, payment solutions, regulated digital assets, new economic models, and DeFi offerings.
On The Flipside
- The irony of big banks flocking to crypto is stunning. They don’t seem to understand that the entire underlying premise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies is the planned obsolescence of the banking industry itself.
- Yet they’re scampering like lemmings to embrace their own demise.
Why You Should Care?
It seems every week we see another banking institution trying to co-op crypto or a banking executive leaving traditional finance to start a blockchain-based venture. These are all positive signals of broadening adoption of the crypto industry, and the unwitting yielding of banks to blockchain’s supremacy.
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