Published on September 11, 2025
Watch the full panel discussion on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel
Panel Discussion with Keeyan Ravanshid (Co-Founder of HODL Markets), Jay Madhu (CEO, Chairman of the Executive Board at SurancePlus), Jaime Baeza (Founder and Managing Partner at AnB Investments), Drake Breeding (Protocol Strategy Manager at Figment), and Christopher Keshian (Founder and CIO at Triton Liquid Fund)
In this panel discussion, experts from various digital asset companies to explore current trends in crypto investments. Panelists discuss topics such as yield funds, tokenized reinsurance, and the role of staking in generating returns. The discussion also touches on regulatory challenges and the importance of real-time analytics in managing crypto portfolios. Panelists share their perspectives on the future of digital asset investments, including the growing interest from institutional investors and the need for regulatory clarity.
Keeyan (HODL Markets)
All right. Good morning, everybody. Glad we have air conditioning in here. It’s a hot day. So we’re going to get started. Thank you for coming to our panel.
The panel is all about yield funds today. I’m joined by some great colleagues in the industry. Thanks everyone for being here. We’re going to start with a quick question for the audience. By the way, my name is Keeyan Ravanshid. I’ll be moderating today.
The quick question for the audience is: how many people in here are LPs or GPs in hedge funds? Okay, so we have a few. And second question is: we always wonder, who here actually lives in the United Arab Emirates? Amazing. Okay, so a lot of people traveled in. That’s great. Good to see.
So rapid fire to get started, guys. Three questions. The questions will be: tell us your name, your company, or what you do. Tell us your hometown and your favorite sport.
Jaime (AnB Investments)
Yeah, my name is Jaime Baeza. I am the founder and managing partner of AnB Investments. We’re a digital asset hedge fund. However, we started back in 2016 in traditional finance and in 2020 we decided to pivot completely into digital assets.
At the moment, we manage a fund structure based in Cayman Islands and we deploy two distinct set of strategies in digital assets. One of the first buckets would be quantitative directional trading and the second bucket delta-neutral strategies.
My favorite sport, I would say, by far is football. I’ve been a very big fan of Atletico Madrid. I’m Spanish. My hometown is Madrid. I also love playing paddle, playing golf, skiing. A lot of sports, to be honest, but football will be for sure my best.
Christopher (Triton Liquid Fund)
Yes, and I am Chris Keshian. I’m the founder and CIO of Triton Liquid. We’re the first crypto-specific liquid fund licensed in Abu Dhabi. That’s where I live.
Triton uses deep qualitative analysis. We do write-ups on projects in the space. We’ve done over 220 write-ups to date. These are like 20-page VC-style deal memos. Then we add a layer of qualitative or quantitative insight on top of that in which we regress metrics across different verticals and rebalance our portfolio according to those metrics with that real-time data, which I’m sure we’ll get to in this panel.
Favorite sport is easily the massive multiplayer online role-playing game called Crypto, which is 24-7 and these markets never close. It’s real-time information on Twitter, data, and I couldn’t imagine a more fun sport.
Jay (SurancePlus)
Excellent. Jay Madhu. I’m the CEO and chairman of Oxbridge Re as well as Surance Plus. My background is capital markets. I’ve been part of four companies that have gone public, three on the Nasdaq, one on the New York Stock Exchange.
Oxbridge is a reinsurance company through Assurance Plus, its subsidiary. We raise capital, issue a tokenized security currently on Avalanche, downstream the money into our reinsurance subsidiary, write reinsurance contracts, and pay out a dividend based on that.
Favorite sport is the business of cricket. I’m not a big sports player, but I love the business of cricket. I was involved with the CPL team, the Jamaica Talibis, a little while ago. That was a lot of fun. If you can’t play it, manage it, right?
Drake (Figment)
Hey, y’all. I’m Drake Breeding, head of protocol strategy at Figment. Figment’s the largest independent institutional staking provider. We run validators on Ethereum, Solana, and over 40 other chains.
My day-to-day role is identifying the new blockchains we want to work with, and doing all of our strategy and go-to-market efforts around things like liquid staking, restaking, Bitcoin staking, etc. Anything that you can stake, we kind of want to support it.
Favorite sport—I love the answer of crypto being your favorite sport. Once you get into crypto, every other thing is just so much less interesting. But if I’m not going to go with that answer, I’ll do college basketball. My Duke Blue Devils had a very tough end of the season, but I still love watching March Madness every year.
Keeyan
Awesome. Some great answers there. I’ll say my favorite sport too, as a Canadian—hockey, of course. Best sport in the world. But I’m a little biased.
So moving on now to some serious business. I know that there is a transition happening now, traditional yield farming and delta-neutral strats, which I know Jaime, you know a lot about, so you’ll start this one off for us.
Can you tell us a bit about the transition that’s happening? Investors are looking more for long-short strats. That’s typically targeted to investors who were previously interested in long-only strategies. Now they want to hold whatever tokens they have. Is this transition happening for real or is it just a headline, and what has your experience been with it?
Jaime
For sure. Yes. So let me give you a bit of background of our products in crypto. As I said before, we pivoted into digital assets in 2020.
At the beginning we only had one product offering, which was quantitative trading strategies in US dollars, denominated in US dollars. Very quickly we learned, we got our heads into digital assets, and we noticed that there was a lot of room, a lot of inefficiency in the market, so we could deploy delta-neutral strategies. But those were still denominated in US dollars.
Then we saw this trend starting, I would say, a year, a year and a half ago, where investors not only wanted to be denominated in US dollars, but also to hold their coins—hold ETH, hold Bitcoin, or hold their coins that they wanted—but to be able to generate returns off those coins.
So what we decided is to make a third product offering, which is basically the same underlying strategies that we were deploying since 2020 in US dollars, but denominated in Bitcoin. What does that mean? It means that an investor can invest one Bitcoin and we will generate return over that Bitcoin with the same underlying strategies that we do in our US dollar denominated strategies.
So to answer your question, yes, definitely, yes, we’re seeing that trend. And not only that, but from February 2024 we started offering this product for our investors as well.
Keeyan
I know you’re running a long-only strategy. Is this something, though, that you’re also seeing?
Christopher
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that we’re increasingly seeing interest in generating yield, especially when you have funds like ours. We develop long-term conviction on assets based off that deep qualitative and quantitative research.
For us, this yield generation looks like staking these assets and generating from that additional yield by providing security to certain networks. A simple example is Solana. We have a large Solana position. It is staked. We earn yield on that. And generally, you don’t want to leave money on the table. So if it makes sense from a smart contract risk perspective to stake an asset, then we will do it.
Drake
I hear stake, I got to throw something on. I’m just kind of curious, from your seat, if you’re looking at getting yield on some of your underlying assets, do you think about something like protocol staking as a different kind of risk compared to DeFi or yield farming? Are those all different layers of risk that you guys take on depending on the asset?
Christopher
Yeah, absolutely. And we actually use Figment. This is our primary staking partner. So phenomenal service. Yeah, we do. And we underwrite these differently and the risk differently. But it’s case by case.
You want to see strong technical audits because the greatest risk is the smart contract risk. If you’re trading a hundred vol asset class, getting an additional 10 percent yield per year—if you could just get the rug pulled out from under you—is oftentimes not worth it.
Keeyan
OK, now to add on to that question, I know that more and more sophisticated investors can participate in a Bitcoin-denominated fund and hold. That seems very interesting as well for individual investors, because there are many that are active, who were early holders of some cryptos, including Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Companies like Gamma Prime, for now one of the most well-known, are allowing more access to retail investors or, let’s say, non-corporate high-net-worth or qualified investors. Are you seeing any shifting demands from them moving more towards long-short rather than market-neutral, delta-neutral strats?
And also, are you as funds changing your tactics or strategies to attract more individual whales, so to speak?
Christopher
I’ll pass that since I’ve already spoken on.
Jaime
Yes, so I think definitely, yes, we do see a trend shifting. There are more and more providers and more and more demand. I think that there is a niche for that to grow.
For us as a fund or as a fund manager, it would be great if we could have lower barriers of entry for our LPs or our investors, and we can cater for many more investors, retail investors, with lower wealth or lower tickets. So definitely, I think there is a lot of room for that. I think that we’re seeing more and more projects starting with this type of offerings, but for us, it will be great.
Unfortunately, because of regulatory reasons, we can only accept one certain type of investors, professional investors, with a relatively high ticket. So with this type of offerings, we will be able to lower that barrier of entry, and that would be great for us, and we’re definitely seeing the demand as well.
Keeyan
Any comments from you guys?
Jay
I think that’s important, right? Lowering that barrier to entry. AML KYC is very important, but you also have to lower that barrier to entry.
You know, we offer a Reg D product through the U.S. and Reg S outside, but we find more and more folks wanting that smaller duration of holding, and we’re working towards that. But I think it’s not only important to put something on chain, but it’s also important to have that liquidity.
Keeyan
So, actually, Jay, that’s a great segue to ask you a question. I know that you mentioned that your business is all about reinsurance. Can you tell us, firstly, a little bit about reinsurance broadly? I know many people here will probably know about it, but can you just give us a 20-second explainer?
And then, as a follow-on to that, I’m actually personally curious: are the benefits of tokenized reinsurance just easier access, like paperwork-wise, or is it also about a secondary market, so that lock-ups are a thing of the past? Yeah, just expand on that a little.
Jay
Yes, so reinsurance is what insurance companies do to lay off their risks. The insurance companies take on the underwrite risk. They lay off that to reinsurers.
We do property casualties, so mostly property reinsurance. Berkshire Hathaway, Lodger London, large reinsurers, we’re one such smaller reinsurer. In the property market, most reinsurance contracts, the barrier to entry is significantly high. Minimum ticket is 5–10 million bucks. If you’re lucky, you can get in with that.
What we’ve done, bridging the gap between the SEC and blockchain, we issue that tokenized security. So it’s a tokenized security. We check all the boxes with the SEC. We make sure that we don’t run afoul of them. Issue that token, and off to the races.
So within three minutes, someone can do their AML, KYC, download the documents, sign their documents, wire in their money, and they have a seat at the table.
Reinsurance is something where I think the majority of the businesses that are out there can be tokenized, or a lot of them can be tokenized, but they have to be done in a particular way. And if you don’t do it that particular way, things go wrong. So I think that’s what all the guys from this panel are. It’s all about compliance.
Keeyan
So just so I can understand, and for the benefit of the audience: what kind of reductions in, let’s say, minimum tickets, numbers-wise, can people expect due to tokenized reinsurance? And also, to bring it back to the rest of the panel as well, are there going to be opportunities for even other funds to invest, or is tokenization really to help individuals invest?
Jay
No, it’s definitely open to anybody who can get in. Obviously, the funds would have some interest in this because they can get in with a smaller dollar amount as opposed to a much larger ticket.
With us, for example, we have two tracks of what we offer, two tokens. One of the security tokens offers a 42% return. Last year, we targeted 42%. We paid out 49%. It’s filed with the SEC. This year, we’re going forward with not only the 42% return token, but also a 20% token.
We find that there are more family offices, funds, and a lot bigger group of folks who are probably looking for a more balanced, stable yield. They don’t want to take the volatility of the other security token. These are all one-year tokens.
Christopher
Yeah, and just to follow on that, we saw a wave of this in—I guess it was two cycles ago now—where yield-generating assets, yield-bearing assets, was kind of the zeitgeist, right? And that was, like, the peak of that mania was UST, Luna, Terra.
And the problem I have with insurance, especially as it pertains to smart contract risk, is you can never actually hedge that risk fully, even with insurance. I was staking UST. For those who don’t know, you could put basically a US dollar pegged asset into their protocol, and you’d earn passively 20% yield. It sounded like a dream. It was not.
The project imploded entirely, and the insurance that I had—this was just in my PA, this was a while ago—it didn’t kick in, because it related only to these specific smart contract dynamics, and not the full implosion of an entity.
So, we are looking for new insurance products in this space, because if we are provided with adequate insurance products for these different staking, yield-generating opportunities, then it makes them significantly more attractive for us.
Jaime
Interesting. If I can add to your second question, if we think that this is only going to be for retail or for other funds as well, I think that it’s important. One factor or one aspect of tokenization is that it allows composability in DeFi.
So I think that is very attractive, not only for retail, but also for potential funds investing or already active in the digital asset space. The fact that you can invest or have a token, which is already generating yield from insurance or from a fund, but you can use that token as collateral, potentially for a loan or other DeFi project, is very attractive.
So I think that is very attractive, not only for retail, but also for potential funds. Obviously, it comes with risk, but there are a lot of use cases that can happen. That’s another benefit as well, this concept of composability.
Keeyan
Okay, that’s very interesting, actually. And speaking of these creative new use cases, I want to bring it back. I mean, it’s a digital assets panel, so we always have to talk about regulation, at least for a couple minutes.
I want to bring it back to what some of the rules are that you are seeing that may impact the funds business with respect to actually executing strategies on DeFi. That’s another new thing that a lot of older, more established digital asset managers, like yourselves, are now recently exploring, if I’m not mistaken.
Are you at all concerned about rules around DeFi execution and how it impacts licensing for funds? I know we’re in a very crypto-friendly country. What about around the world?
Jaime
For sure. It’s an issue. Not an issue, no, but it’s something that you have to take in mind when you’re running on-chain strategies from a licensed or regulated vehicle.
And not only that, but our fund used to be based in the US. However, because of regulatory constraints, because we weren’t very sure that we could still be operating as we used to, as we operate now, in centralized exchanges and in DeFi from the US, we decided to pivot and move to a new regulatory home, which is BVI as an interim solution, and hopefully in the next few months here in Dubai.
So, for sure, it’s a thing. The hope, and I’m pretty sure, is that regulatory clarity will become a thing, or these regulations will become more clear in the future. But it’s definitely something that you have to take into consideration.
Keeyan
Amazing. And is there a similar reason that—I know that you mentioned you’re in Abu Dhabi, right?—is there a similar reason for the fact that you moved?
And also, can you tell us about the risks? Is there a difference in risk management for executing on DeFi versus CeFi?
Christopher
Yeah, absolutely. There’s huge differences in risk. Mainly, that relates to smart contract risk. You are trusting code that, yes, can be audited, but even if it’s audited, there can still be bugs and whatnot. And so that, that’s the primary risk that we’re trying to mitigate whenever we assess the viability of any of these yield-generating strategies.
As it pertains to the UAE, I was looking at Hong Kong, Singapore, and the UAE to set up my fund, and just a quick plug for Abu Dhabi, it’s one of the more advanced and progressive regulatory regimes for this new age of finance. In the U.S., what we’ve seen to date is an attempt to fit this new asset class into older securities frameworks. And frankly, new laws and new regimes need to be written that can propel this into the next maturation period that will bring in a wave of institutional capital and actually make them comfortable.
So that is why we’re there, and we think it’s going to be the fastest-growing crypto economy globally, the UAE, and will ultimately take the lead, just based off all the moves they are making on the regulatory front.
Jay
I’m a big proponent of regulation, but if you think about the Gartner curve, and you wonder where our industry is in that curve, opinions will vary. However, you have Las Vegas, and you have Wall Street. Both have their place.
So it doesn’t mean one needs to go away and the other one survives. It just depends on everybody’s appetite, what somebody wants to invest in, and which direction they go to. But as long as there is some compliance — actually, there should be compliance — and as long as there’s compliance, things usually fall into place.
Drake
We spend a lot of time thinking about regulation, and I think the point that we’re pigeonholing these totally new things into frameworks that are so old is crazy. The Howey test in the United States is the classic example of what defines a security. It’s based off buying orange groves. It’s from a court case from 1940. It’s insane to think that Solana staking applies to that.
From where we sit, I think that the first really on-chain activity that most institutions do is staking. That’s the easiest thing to do. It’s the easiest thing to understand. I can start getting rewards on my assets. But that’s really the Trojan horse, I think, to getting a lot more DeFi activity enshrined in the law in a lot of different jurisdictions.
In the U.S. for a long time, we had zero productive conversations with anybody. New administration, things have changed a lot. Those folks are a lot more engaged. They’re sophisticated. They get it. I’m actually pretty excited about what’s gonna hopefully come out of that.
And then, in jurisdictions like the UAE and Singapore, even in Hong Kong now, we’re seeing very positive advancements.
Keeyan
All very good things. So now I actually have a specific question that I’m gonna ask Triton. I know that earlier we were talking about your sort of special live blockchain analytics process, where you are getting better, faster analytics results and signals than traditional asset managers.
So, how do you do that? Are you using external infrastructure? Is it your own? Is it something that you think is going to decay over time? Just like HFT, you know, was very profitable 30 years ago. It’s still profitable, but is it something that decays over time as your edge? Or do you think everyone’s gonna be able to eventually get that edge?
Christopher
Yeah, so just a quick note. A lot of the space is tiny in the grand scheme of global asset classes. It’s like a $3 trillion asset class. It’s miniscule. So, a lot of the more sophisticated quant shops, like D.E. Shaw, where I almost worked out of grad school had I not built this fund, they only have the mandate to trade Bitcoin and ETH.
But the unique thing about this space is that there is a wealth of real-time data that’s available to users and investors, if they have the tools to actually pull that data. Every one of these projects operates on a transparent blockchain. You can see real-time users, new users joining a protocol, TVL, just general growth metrics.
As I mentioned at the start of the panel, what we do is we divide the space into 24 verticals. For each vertical — say it’s lending, or decentralized exchanges, or layer ones — we build regression models to understand what are the primary price drivers that we can pull with minute tick data, 24/7, to understand how the competitive landscape in just, say, the DEX space is comparing.
So, say I’m invested in Uniswap, and I’ve identified that number of new users, daily active users, TVL, number of trading pairs, and volume per trading pair are the five metrics that matter. And when regressed against price for that DEX vertical, they are the most significant variables that come up.
So, what we do is we actively manage this book sector by sector, and rebalance based off these leading metrics that we can pull real-time. How does this pertain to staking? Well, you can actually monitor smart contract risk real-time as well.
We have live notification feeds, and if we are staking a project and there is any smoke around it, we will unstake it immediately. That’s like thinking fast and slow — system one, system two. It’s kind of our system one: immediate, quick, get out. And then system two would be more of the methodical going back in and saying, okay, did we make the right move or not?
But it’s usually in this space where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and if you can monitor that with real-time analytics, you can save yourself a lot of losses.
Keeyan
Perfect. I know we have more questions, but we want to take some questions from the audience as well. I’m going to ask one more quick rapid-fire question here. Just give a few seconds answer. We’ll go down, and then we’ll take three or four questions.
We were discussing earlier that we’ve seen some data that a hundred institutions were surveyed in the U.S. 59% of them said that they plan to allocate more than 5% of their AUM to digital assets within the next five years. So, is that understated, overstated, and do you have a number prediction of the percent allocation of these institutional allocators in 2030? What will that look like? We’ll go down from the end.
Drake
There’s a lot with that. I think directionally, by 2030, if you’re an asset allocator and you’re not looking at crypto, you’re missing out on the best asset class of the last 15 years, hands-down. Also, the only asset class that’s had any type of real liquidity or distribution to their LPs in the last few years. Traditional ventures, absolutely not doing it.
So, I think that number grows. Depends on how you define institutions. There’s a lot of asterisks with that, but directionally, I think it’s about right.
Jay
I think it’s widely understated. With the various companies and large banks, institutions that are going into it, especially with the changes in the U.S. that came through in November, I think that number grows significantly. So, I think that 5% grows well north of that.
Christopher
Yeah, I agree with that, but I think a more nuanced version of this question is: what is crypto? Is it anything that’s based on blockchain rails? And if that’s the case, I think it’s going to be far higher than 5%.
Because you have Bitcoin, you have this long tail of assets and projects with tokens that back them, that have real cash yields. And then you also have real-world assets and different things that will be tokenized, put on chain.
So, if you’re asking if that 5% number pertains to any blockchain-based asset, I think it’s going to be far higher by 2030.
Keeyan
Will you break with the rest? 3 versus 1 or 4-0?
Jaime
No, no, I completely agree with all and with all the nuances that they mentioned. I think as well, maybe not all of those are in public, especially when speaking about real-world assets. Maybe not all of them will be in public blockchains, maybe also private blockchains, but real-world asset tokenization is definitely a trend that is very hard to stop.
And regarding the rest of the comments, I completely agree, especially with the U.S. massive shift with the Trump administration in the view of crypto and the announcement of the Bitcoin reserve or stockpile of the rest of the coins, etc. I think it’s at least understated.
Keeyan
Perfect. The strategic Dogecoin reserve, that’s coming soon. Perfect.
All right, we have time for two questions or maybe three, depends on how fast they are. Does anyone have any questions? We’ll pass the microphone.
No questions whatsoever. Okay, Patrick, is that you? I can see you from there.
Patrick (EMF family office)
Hi guys, Patrick Martin, EMF family office. So how important do you think yield is in general in the ecosystem? Because I think most people are just playing crypto casino and you’re more sophisticated than that, but I think—is that going to be the future of most applications in blockchain for TradFi and other more serious investors to come in?
Jaime
I didn’t quite get the question. I think the question was if we think that yield is going to be a function of the adoption of blockchain?
Patrick
Yeah, I think if you think yield is an important factor to get it more adopted in the mainstream sort of TriadFi or traditional finance sector.
Drake
I can say I think absolutely. I mean, Solana—you’re talking about what’s basically a high-growth tech protocol that also has 10% native annual staking rewards. You just don’t get that in most other places.
You know, Facebook stock is not paying 10% dividends. I think it’s super attractive and when institutions are talking to us, that is one of the first questions we get—what do I actually get on top of it?
I think if you fast forward a few years, a world with staking ETFs, a world where liquid staking is more adopted and applied in DeFi, it’s a super important part of the growth story of crypto in my opinion.
Christopher
Yeah, and just to follow on that—fixed income is the basis of financial markets. So I think that will naturally be the base of this space.
And then the question, the natural corollary, is what will be the base yield for this space? Is it the base yield that you can get from staking ETH, or Solana, or something else? I think that’s TBD, but definitely.
Jaime
Oh, yeah, I completely agree. I would also add that obviously that’s higher, it’s an attraction for outside capital to come into crypto and to deal with the yield.
But also, as we probably see in time now, as more capital comes in, those yields start to come down because the market cannot handle those high yields.
So it’s a double-edged sword, but I definitely agree. It’s definitely a very attractive return, especially compared to traditional finance.
Keeyan
Perfect. We have time for one final quick question. If anyone has a question, let’s see.
I guess we’ll go to the gentleman that raised his hand first. Perfect. Patrick, can you pass the microphone, please? Thank you.
Spectator
There was something said about insurance. I have a question about insurance in the crypto ecosystem. Are insurance platforms serving themselves? For example, ChainProof backed by Qantas Stamp insures a few platforms, but I’m thinking about the insurance platform insuring billions of dollars. If some incident happens, can we be insured by that insurance startup that they will provide the fund?
Keeyan
When have insurance companies ever done anything wrong before? Jay, I guess that question.
Jay
I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite follow the question, but I think insuring any kind of platform is important. But then going back a little bit to the previous question—yield is important, but to your question, can you insure that yield?
What is the underlying asset? Is that underlying asset putting too much leverage to give a person that yield?
That’s something that people need to worry about more. Insurance is important, but knowledge of what somebody is investing in and not depending on the insurance product—that’s even more important.
Spectator
That’s right, but what’s insurance? Insurance is a side product behind that yield generation product. Insurance itself should be available, but maybe they cannot provide billions of dollars when they insure something like that by 2% insurance cost.
Keeyan
Are you referring to maybe the smart contract risk, to basically audit the fact that behind a tokenized insurance product there’s actual assets to back out, to pay out claims?
Spectator
The underlying asset itself. For example, ChainProof has insured a few protocol pools with 200 million dollars in USDC, but if the whole money is gone because of some risk, maybe they cannot be solvent to insure that product.
Keeyan
I see. I think that’s a very good question. We should take it or chat about it after.
Jay
Yeah, happy to answer that offline. I think what the gentleman’s referring to is reinsurance. You buy reinsurance to cover the asset class, whatever. Exactly.
Yeah, that’s a tough one. Happy to chat about it. We run a company in Florida that we started 17 years ago with 10 million bucks. Today, we bring in over a billion dollars in revenue, make over 100 million in profit, with the fourth largest insurance underwriter in the state of Florida. Florida’s the 14th largest economy in the world, so I understand how investors look.
I think about it myself as well. Just because somebody’s put out the money and someone’s offering yield, if things go wrong, the investor needs to be made whole. However, the investor still needs to worry about what they’re investing in. So reinsurance or insurance is not the end-all be-all. It’s education and worrying about what that investment is.
Keeyan
Awesome. All right, that’s gonna wrap it up for today. Thank you to the wonderful panelists and wonderful audience.
