A research-driven liquid vehicle that approached crypto-native markets through volatility regimes, convexity constraints, and structural risk. This archive documents the fund's philosophy and approach during its operational period.
MUNICH, GERMANY
Markets exist in distinct liquidity and volatility regimes. These regimes are not random; they exhibit persistence, clustering, and structural transitions. The fund identified regime boundaries through volatility surfaces, funding rates, and cross-asset correlations. Position sizing and strategy selection were regime-dependent, not static.
Volatility is not noise. It encodes information about market structure, liquidity depth, and tail risk. The fund treated volatility surfaces as primary data, not secondary metrics. Implied volatility skews, term structures, and cross-asset volatility correlations revealed mispricings and regime shifts before they appeared in spot prices.
Liquidity is not a constant. It is a structural property that varies across time, assets, and market conditions. The fund mapped liquidity regimes through order book depth, spread dynamics, and execution slippage. Strategies were designed to be liquidity-aware, with position sizing inversely proportional to liquidity risk.
Risk was not an afterthought or a compliance requirement. It was a first-class constraint that shaped every decision: position sizing, strategy selection, and capital allocation. The fund used convexity analysis, tail risk metrics, and regime-dependent risk models. No strategy proceeded without explicit risk bounds and exit conditions.
Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) was a mathematician who demonstrated that financial markets do not follow Gaussian distributions. His work on fractals and fat-tailed distributions revealed that price movements exhibit self-similarity across time scales and that extreme events occur far more frequently than classical models predict. Mandelbrot challenged the assumption that market returns are normally distributed, showing instead that volatility clusters, correlations break down during crises, and tail risks are structural rather than anomalous. His framework reframed risk as an inherent property of market structure rather than a deviation from equilibrium. This perspective informed the fund's approach to volatility as information, convexity as a first-class constraint, and liquidity regimes as the primary determinant of strategy viability. Mandelbrot's mathematics provided a language for markets as they are, not as they are assumed to be.
"The Gaussian framework is a beautiful theory, but it is not a theory of the real world."
—
Lukas Gruber
Founder
The fund was deliberately shut down after capital was reallocated into upstream infrastructure, tokenized equity, and capital formation systems. The research, frameworks, and risk models developed during the fund's operational period remain intact. The vehicle is retired; the knowledge persists.