Ember Fund is a company that aims to fundamentally change the way people make investments in digital assets. The firm has created a technology solution that allows people to easily buy into a managed portfolio of digital currencies. The Ember Fund team intends to bring key trading insights and technologies traditionally only available to institutional clients to anyone in the world who has $300 to invest and a mobile device.
Ember developers claim that projects are fully decentralized/non-custodial, which means that its users are responsible for providing custody of their own assets. Users’ digital asset holdings are accessible only via their individual mobile device.
Recently, we caught up with Alex Wang, co-founder and CEO at Ember Fund. While speaking to Crowdfund Insider, Wang talked about making digital asset investment opportunities more accessible to retail investors. He also revealed what his company intends to do with the $357,000+ capital they recently raised in a Reg CF offering which is still live on Republic.
You’ve mentioned that you’re partnering with a cryptocurrency hedge fund in order to introduce institutional-grade investment products to retail clients through your company’s mobile app. Please tell us about this offering.
Alex Wang: “Blockforce Capital is a multi-strategy fund for institutional investors that optimizes return and risk through modern portfolio theory, active risk management, and quantitative finance. Ember Fund will be working with its team of data scientists, machine learning engineers, computational astrophysicists, and Wall Street veterans to launch an algorithmic Bitcoin portfolio.
This portfolio leverages machine learning and regression analysis to generate signals and automatically rebalance between Bitcoin and a stablecoin. The algorithm measures long-term market trends, seeking to participate in the general upside of the cryptocurrency market while strategically losing exposure during downturns. The model attempts to improve risk versus long positions by 30%-35% by exiting its position in downward trending markets.
We’re really excited to be partnering. Both companies align on the vision to democratize access to institutional-grade investment products. Until now, there just hasn’t been a seamless, compliant, secure way to do this. We see a ton of synergies between the two companies.
We’ve believe that we’ve built a powerful platform that allows anyone in the world to securely invest in portfolios in a non-custodial, user friendly way. Blockforce has an entire team of machine learning and talented engineers working full time to look at and analyze on-chain data to make sense of price movements. Bringing that on to the Ember platform and combining forces just made a ton of sense.”
You’ve noted that you recently launched a regulated equity crowdfunding offering on Republic. You also revealed that the company has raised over $340,000 in capital in only a few weeks after launch. Please tell us what you intend to do with the funds you’ve raised.
Alex Wang: “We’ve spent this past year building the infrastructure and various investment products. We’ve processed millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of transactions and have tens of thousands of happy users. Our only goal is to deploy as much of this capital on acquiring more users as profitably as possible. What this means is testing new marketing channels and scaling up some existing channels that are already working for us.”
Your company will launch a quant fund that “algorithmically rebalances” between Bitcoin (BTC) and a stablecoin. Why have you developed this product? And why is it important or useful?
Alex Wang: “We’ve already constructed a few portfolios that are altcoin-heavy. The idea behind this fund was to construct one that only trades between Bitcoin and a stablecoin. Across enough time, we wanted an effective way to hedge the downside and capture as much as the upside as possible.
Something like this just wasn’t previously available to retail investors. We’re excited to be partnering with Blockforce on this. The entire point of crypto is to democratize financial products and custody your own money. We believe this product aligns with our mission and brings us closer to that reality.”
You’re introducing a staking product (backed by Compound.finance) that will give users an X% APR that will be paid “every 15 seconds.” How did you develop this product and why should people invest in it?
Alex Wang: “We’re using the Compound protocol to deliver this product. This is exciting for us because it will give our users an opportunity to park their crypto and earn interest in a non-custodial way. This is useful in down markets when users aren’t doing much trading and also beneficial to add to our algorithmic funds, some of which are in a stablecoin 60-80% of the time earning interest.
This is revolutionary because end consumers are finally able to trustlessly, securely make their money work for them without rent-seeking institutions in the middle extracting value. This is how the interest rates are so high compared to traditional lending products, you are literally going direct and disintermediating banks.
Also, the way that the protocol was built is unique in that it’s effectively a decentralized pool of assets where interest rates are programmatically set based on the supply and demands of that liquidity. This allows for near instant redemption of the loans and overcomes all the hurdles of traditional decentralized lending (having to review, supervise, underwrite individual loans).”
Please tell us about the main products and services that you are planning to offer in the short-term and the long-term.
Alex Wang: “In the short term, the lending product and the algo fund are the ones we are focusing on. In the long term, the possibilities are endless. I imagine a day where users from a third world country can earn Bitcoin (BTC), invest in the app and get access to an entire suite of assets (real estate, cryptocurrencies, collectibles, securities, fractional shares of a startup) and have a top-tier quants or asset managers provide their expertise and apply it to those assets, all without having to interface with the traditional banking system. That’s entirely possible and extremely exciting to us.”
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