Tetras Capital, the New-York based digital currency hedge fund with a “short Ethereum” thesis, is shutting down and returning remaining assets under management to investors. The fund launched in 2017 with the intention to trade altcoins, but became infamous for shorting Ethereum when ETH’s average price was $700.
According to reports, Tetras Capital is down 75% since it launched in 2017. However, it would be easy for hedge funds to avoid significant losses if they stuck to Bitcoin and did not gamble their money in low-cap altcoins or hobby platforms like Ethereum.
Why digital hedge funds should consider Bitcoin
Bitcoin (BSV) is one of the best performing digital assets since its inception. At press time, BSV is up 128% from the day it was created on November 15, 2018.
Unlike low market cap altcoins with no future, blockchain protocols that are constantly changing due to protocol upgrades, or blockchains that are limited by artificial technical parameters such as finite block size limit or low throughput, Bitcoin is the only blockchain protocol that is unbounded, stable, and where value-creation is fundamental and not speculative.
Bitcoin is the only scalable blockchain protocol, unlike BTC and ETH, there is no block size limit on BSV. In addition, the Bitcoin network is capable of handling thousands of transactions per second, compared to networks like BTC and ETH that are restricted to only 7 and 15 transactions per second respectively. Eric Bernhard from The Bayesian Group, a Toronto based FinTech company that runs the world’s first AI-Quant Crypto Hedge Fund explains:
“Outside of BSV, we don’t see many exciting opportunities. Let’s take ETH as an example—ETH doesn’t currently have a hard cap on total supply, which reduces our excitement from an investment perspective. When combined with the clear scalability problems that ETH is experiencing, it’s easy to see why we’re bearish on ETH’s outlook.”
The technological freedom on Bitcoin in addition to the protocol being set in stone gives both companies and investors confidence in the Bitcoin protocol. It allows businesses to build atop Bitcoin, without worrying about protocol updates that could make their previous work invalid—a problem with Ethereum. And the features of Bitcoin give investors confidence that value is fundamentally being added to the Bitcoin protocol, and that their funds won’t end up like Tetras Capital’s.
Will more funds close?
The Tetras Capital shut down comes shortly after the first digital currency hedge fund in the U.K., Prime Factor Capital, closed its doors, citing insufficient demand as the primary reason.
Data from Crypto Fund Research also shows that fewer digital currency hedge funds are opening each year. In 2019, only 45 digital currency funds launched, compared to the 284 digital currency funds that opened in 2018.
With the future of every blockchain network that isn’t Bitcoin looking grim, you can expect to see even fewer digital currency hedge funds launch this year compared to last year, and even more digital currency hedge funds shut down.
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