by Jascha Samadi, May 03

Investing in crypto and in particular investing across all layers of the stack not only tends to be quite different from traditional VC, it also leads you to opportunities that incentivize or even require you to be an active participant of and a contributor to the things you invest in as opposed to just a passive token holder. In many cases and in particular in defi, contribution can be publicly measured in resources provided to a network, e.g. computational, human or financial resources. As an early-stage investor in such networks, providing such resources is not only something that is oftentimes highly incentivized by the network and thus an opportunity to generate yield, it also helps bootstrap a network in the early days while allowing you to learn a lot about the inside of the systems you invest in.

Looking at the complexity of opportunities and the variety of ways to interact with a protocol for the purpose of providing resources and earning yield, we are happy to share today that Gleb Dudka joined us as Senior Analyst to lead the firm’s efforts in active network participation, also referred to as generalized mining.

Gleb has been working in the crypto space for many years. He started his career as a Research Analyst at Astratum, a blockchain venture studio in Berlin after graduating from ESB Business School. At the beginning of 2019 he joined T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, where he initiated, fundraised for and led their Staking-as-a-Service unit as a Product Owner. By doing so T-Systems became the first global enterprise player to offer staking services and to engage in generalized mining on public crypto networks. During his time at the company Gleb structured crypto-native business models for T-Systems and led many of their initiatives into some of the top Web3 protocols like Chainlink or Flow, eventually turning the organization into what he describes as a mini “hedge fund”. Recently he further played a key role in Deutsche Telekom’s first direct crypto investment into Celo.

Besides that, Gleb is also an editor at StakingRewards.com and a guest lecturer for Blockchain and Crypto at the SRH University of Applied Sciences in Berlin.

Please join us in officially welcoming Gleb to our team.

As another great piece of news we are extremely happy that Georg Reichhelm joined us full time as Portfolio Manager towards the end of last quarter. Georg has been with the firm as a visiting analyst since summer of last year focusing on dealflow analysis, DD support and general research. Earlier this year he graduated from Frankfurt School of Finance and in his new role he will work closely with the investment team focusing on not only monitoring the performance of the firm’s liquid portfolios but in particular also on analyzing on-chain data and supporting the investment team with insights into the networks and protocols that the firm holds a stake in.

We want to thank Georg for his continuous support and couldn’t be happier for him to join us full time now.