David Angliss, an analyst with Australia’s leading cryptocurrency investment firm, Apollo Capital, shares the fund’s weekly take on what’s happening in the fast-changing and volatile cryptocurrency space.

Apollo Capital is on a hiring spree after a stellar year last year, and even plans to start an investment DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) to incubate new web3.0 projects.

The DAO doesn’t have a name as yet but Apollo is launching it in conjunction with crypto compliance and payments company Banxa; Sydney-based horse racing NFT game Zed.Run and Melbourne-based crypto brokerage company Caleb & Brown.

“We have rented a 700sqm office space for entrepreneurs and creators for co-working, events, NFT exhibitions and to connect the community with traditional industry and government,” reads Apollo’s job posting for a leader of the investment DAO position.

“The time is now to nurture local ideas and talent and to support building the next global decacorns of web3 that will change the world.”

Apollo is also hiring for a quantitative crypto trader,  as well as a crypto portfolio manager that will work alongside chief investment officer Henrik Andersson.
 

2021 in review

Apollo’s flagship Capital Fund returned 236 per cent in 2021, compared to a 60 per cent gain for Bitcoin.

“Our thesis at Apollo Capital is that the world (crypto asset industry) is much larger than Bitcoin, and we always encourage investors to have a broader allocation to crypto than just Bitcoin,” Andersson told investors during the firm’s fourth-quarter update last week.

Apollo’s market-neutral Capital Opportunities Fund enjoyed 30 per cent gains, with positive returns each month, even when the market was crashing.

Andersson said a big theme of 2021 was “alternative layer one” blockchains that surged as Ethereum struggled to keep up with transaction volume.

“I think we have a good exposure there in the portfolio, things like Polkadot, Algorand, Avalanche, Solana, Matic, in that bucket of alternative layer ones, so that’s something we are monitoring very closely,” he said.

The other sector that had a breakthrough year was of course the NFT space, but Apollo doesn’t invest in artwork or specific games that might use NFTs directly.

“We’ll only invest in infrastructure plays, that will benefit from all the activity on NFTs or in games or in the metaverse,” Apollo investment partner Marc Woodward told the briefing.

The DAO will help incubate new web3.0 deals in Australia, Woodward said.

The firm last month invested in a similar infrastructure play, Perion DAO, a crypto gaming guild, and last year invested in Immutable, the Sydney-based blockchain company that’s starting a NFT gaming marketplace with Gamestop.

The views, information, or opinions expressed in the interview in this article are solely those of the interviewee and do not represent the views of Stockhead.

Stockhead has not provided, endorsed or otherwise assumed responsibility for any financial product advice contained in this article.

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