Like many new ventures, the idea for Titan came about when a few good friends came across a new, common problem that they couldn’t find an existing solution for. In Titan’s case, these friends were a collection of cryptocurrency investing enthusiasts who were sold on the blockchain value proposition and its associated disruption potential, but wanted to outsource their investing decisions to an active manager given the dearth of credible research in the space and the complexity of performing quality due diligence on a new asset class. We looked around for a way to deploy our capital with a professional investment team, but the few funds that met our criteria only took institutional and high-net-worth money, with large minimum investments and processes that were prohibitively arduous for retail investors. Given our experiences managing our own cryptocurrency portfolios over the past few years, we ultimately decided that it might actually make sense to do this ourselves.

While relatively young, we are passionate about cryptocurrency and have a synergistic set of skills — formal finance, operations and engineering training paired with an open-mindedness, risk appetite, and willingness to commit time to a nascent but game-changing technology. Our experience across long/short hedge funds, macro investing, control private equity, investment banking, management consulting and high-growth startups naturally lend themselves to the longer-term, value-investing philosophies that we think the cryptocurrency markets could benefit from. While there are other shorter-term focused traders who may be better equipped to profit from daily volatility, we can remain differentiated as one of the first to adapt and flex “fundamental” analysis to blockchain business models. This would give us the opportunity to marry our skillsets from both our experience at top-performing funds, as well as from our personal crypto investing endeavors (many of us have invested as early as 2014 and have had the good fortune of seeing our efforts result in double-digit return multiples on personal capital). Still, we see in this market an asset class in which institutional knowledge and best practices have not been built. Titan is our chance to start at ground-zero, become one of the first professional players in this niche, and aspire to become expert investors in a sector where such actors have yet to surface.

Titan’s main goal boils down to setting up a professionally managed fund that is accessible to anyone. “Professional” to us means performing rigorous due diligence on potential investments that are held to the same high standards as we were trained to do in the high-stakes environments of investment banking / private equity / hedge funds, but tailored to the idiosyncrasies of a frontier market. Professionalism also means transparency as to how fees are calculated, the cadence and thought-quality of investor reporting, and most importantly, a management team that is truly aligned with its investors. True alignment in the realm of professional alternative asset managers manifests in forced co-invests and contingent-heavy fee structures to make sure the team has real skin in the game.

In our white paper’s “Macro Backdrop and Opportunities/Risks in Crypto Investing” section, we make a reference to an analogy comparing a professional crypto investor’s ability to generate alpha to a professional poker player’s ability to profit at relatively less experienced tables, primarily given the crypto market’s esoteric and asymmetric information flow. At its core, Titan’s goal is to level the playing field for retail investors (the least experienced players) so they can benefit from the skillset and discipline of a professional investor. We hope that Titan will gradually help educate the many retail investors currently in the space, as well as those waiting on the sidelines who have reservations or are otherwise unaware of the opportunity to invest in what we think will inevitably evolve into the foundation of the next great technological era.