(Bloomberg) — LedgerPrime, a digital-asset hedge fund that was a part of the collapsed FTX empire, is back under a new name.
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Now MNNC Group, the Cayman Islands-registered, multi-strategy hedge fund has raised an undisclosed amount of money from backers, including those who invested in LedgerPrime, a subsidiary of Ledger Holdings, which was acquired by FTX US in 2021.
While MNNC Group was not able to attract all of LedgerPrime’s previous investors, it raised an amount in the “mid-eight-figures,” said Shiliang Tang, general partner and special advisor to MNNC Group. He declined to disclose the exact number because the capital isn’t fully deployed to its existing market neutral strategy fund and its upcoming directional fund yet.
MNNC Group’s flagship quantitative market neutral strategy fund was launched in January and closed the month with roughly 4% in returns, said Laura Vidiella del Blanco, head of business development and strategy. Its new directional fund is expected to launch in March.
“What’s helping us is obviously the track record,” said Ayesha Kiani, chief operating officer at MNNC Group. “The other thing obviously worked in our favor is that we weren’t at fault with FTX. We have returned outside capitals in September 2022.”
LedgerPrime was converted into a family office for FTX’s sister trading firm Alameda Research in September 2022. After FTX and Alameda declared bankruptcy, LedgerPrime was forced to wind down.
MNNC Group currently has 11 employees and the majority of them are from LedgerPrime, including Vidiella del Blanco and Kiani. LedgerPrime’s Chief Technology Officer Johannes van Zeijts has also joined the new fund. Among MNNC Group’s new hires are Boris Iyutin, who was at high frequency trading shop Tower Research Capital and will replace Tang as its chief investment officer. Tang said he is no longer involved in the day-to-day management of MNNC Group. Tang, Iyutin and van Zeijts used to work on a proprietary trading desk at Merrill Lynch together.
Iyutin said the fund plans to hire a few more employees as the firm prepares to launch its directional strategy and other new strategies.
At its peak, LedgerPrime managed as much as $400 million in total assets, with an annualized return averaged at roughly 40%, MNNC Group said.
“Generally it’s been a pretty good environment for us,” said Tang. “I mean like volatility is very high, funding rates are very high, DeFi yields are pretty high. So generally, I mean, it’s a pretty healthy environment akin to I guess what we’ll call it 2021 markets.”
MNNC Group is not the only new fund to emerge from LedgerPrime. Zaheer Ebtikar, a former portfolio manager at LedgerPrime, now runs crypto fund Split Capital.
(Updates with detail on Tang’s role at MNNC Group in the seventh paragraph. Earlier version corrected spelling of last name for Zaheer Ebtikar in last paragraph.)
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