- Des Mac Intyre, a former senior at Bridgewater Associates and co-founder of Eolas Capital, is leading a $25 million fundraising round for COSIMO, a digital asset holding business that was established in 2014.
- The company is involved in several cryptocurrency areas, such as custody, tokenized venture, and a staking hedge fund.
In a funding round managed by Des Mac Intyre, a co-founder of Eolas Capital and a former executive at Bridgewater Associates and Mellon Investments Corporation, COSIMO, a digital asset holding business established in 2014, is raising $25 million.
The action is part of COSIMO’s plan to unify its diverse range of crypto investing, custody, advice, and brokerage services under a single, cohesive, forward-thinking brand.
The company, which will now be called COSIMO digital, is a relatively modest entity that specializes in “deep tech.” After ten years of business, COSIMO has branched out into several crypto subsectors and hopes to compete with Galaxy Digital, a crypto management and service provider, but with a presence in the US and EU.
Although we are obviously not as large as Galaxy just yet, it is our goal. We have been developing head-down. Up until now, we haven’t taken that kind of media approach seriously. To date, we have been extremely silent.
Tokenizers who were early
Prior to branching out into cryptocurrency venture finance in 2017, the company invested in early-stage crypto startups in 2014 using special-purpose vehicles.
Hynes claimed that before attempting to tokenize it, he and his co-founder, Rob Frasca, an early internet pioneer who started a number of businesses that were later bought by Intuit. COSIMO Chief Technology Officer Ken Lang was the CTO of Lycos, one of the largest web search engines at the start of the new millennium.
Since it took roughly two years to determine the tax ramifications of what was then a relatively new practice, we actually halted our regular capital raise and chose to take that route. To be honest, we ended up teaching our five separate sets of lawyers and three different groups of international tax specialists more than they were able to assist us.
Finally launched in 2019, the COSIMO X fund currently oversees assets worth roughly $21 million. Hynes pointed out that COSIMO was one of the early, if not the first, paying customers of tokenize behemoth Securitize and provided input as a sort of “beta user” to a company that currently collaborates with companies like Hamilton Lane and BlackRock.
Based on the idea that blockchains may enhance the whole process of issuing, preserving, and transferring a variety of “real-world assets,” tokenization is one of the most promising areas of the cryptocurrency space. By the end of the decade, the tokenized landscape may have grown to a multi-trillion dollar industry, according to some estimations.
“Favorable tailwinds”
Wallet provider Uphold, Bitcoin DeFi pioneer Sovyrn, Layer 1 chain Hedera, and tokenization business Black Manta are just a few of the roughly 25 investments in COSMIO X’s portfolio. The fund also invested in ndau, an unpegged “long-term store-of-value” token developed by Oneiro, one of COSIMO’s investments, which was rendered tradeable on Securitize Markets in 2021. The fund has 15% performance fees and 2.5% management costs.
COSIMO Y, a hedge fund based on a basket of staking rewards from chains like Avalanche, Cardano, Celestia, Ethereum, Near, Polkadot, and Solana, was also introduced by the company. COSIMO has partnered with industry leaders BitGo for custody, Figment and Foundry for staking services, and CME Group and Coinbase for futures.
The goal of COSIMO Y is to make it as simple as possible for investors to invest in the remaining 50% of the market, just as Grayscale did for Bitcoin.
According to Hynes, a significant portion of the firm’s customer consists of traditional financial individuals, including family offices and extremely wealthy individuals. Additionally, one university endowment from the European Foundation think tank and Rochester Institute of Technology supports it. He calculated that roughly 10% of the investors in the funds are “digital natives.”
In the last four to five weeks, he noted, the firm has seen an increase in institutional investors wishing to enter the market because of “the positive tailwinds that have emerge from the election and, ideally, bring clarity to the regulatory environment.”
Together with the X and Y funds, COSIMO established Fortuna, a custodian of digital assets authorized by the Central Bank of Ireland to conduct business in 27 EU nations. Additionally, the company is the biggest investor in Black Manta, one of just two broker-dealers in the digital asset management market that are licensed by BaFin.
After the announcement of the company’s most recent strategic round, Hynes stated that the company is preparing to make further announcements, one of which will be a new initiative using the creator economy.
We think COSIMO Digital is a very important player in these new and interesting areas, and we are thrilled to work with them on their future expansion.
Disclaimer : This article was created for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. An asset’s past performance does not predict its future returns. Before making an investment, please conduct your own research, as digital assets like cryptocurrencies are highly risky and volatile financial instruments.
