Date: 15 February 2023
Author: FINTECH Circle

The 21e6 Capital team builds upon strong academic roots with a track record of leading crypto asset and decentralized finance (DeFi) publications and research, ensuring state-of-the-art crypto investment solutions for professional investors, family offices and asset managers.

How would you describe your business in one sentence?

21e6 Capital is a Swiss-based crypto investment advisor, connecting professional investors with crypto investment products optimized for low drawdowns and high risk-adjusted returns.

Tell us why your company is a game changer for our industry?

The 21e6 Capital team builds upon strong academic roots with a track record of leading crypto asset and decentralized finance (DeFi) publications and research, ensuring state-of-the-art crypto investment solutions for professional investors, family offices and asset managers.

We believe that digital assets are a new asset class. With this conviction, our team has analyzed over 1,000 crypto hedge funds across the world and condensed them into a selection that can yield crypto-exposure with minimized downside risk.

Passive, index based investing through a trusted instrument is not truly possible for crypto assets yet, even though index investing is a massive market for equities. We expect the use-case for this to directly translate into the crypto asset market.

For this reason, we have created a family of benchmark indices, based on six sectors of the crypto market. These next generation crypto sector indices to provide an accurate benchmark for emerging sectors within the crypto industry. 

We will begin launching ETPs in Q2 2023. These products will allow retail and professional investors to simply “buy the market”, like they would when buying an index ETF. The 21e6 Index ETPs will be traded on traditional stock exchanges and 1:1 physically backed by a fully licensed custodian in Germany. 

We believe that this will trigger a new wave of web3 investor: those looking for a liquid and easily tradeable product that lets them participate in the growing market of one of the most disruptive technologies in a generation.

What has been your biggest achievement to date?

• 21e6 Capital has successfully launched their first fund strategies in May 2022 and managed to outperform Bitcoin by over 34% since inception.
• Our crypto fund database is probably one of the most expansive of any crypto fund manager, with over 1200 crypto funds sorted by AuM, inception year, jurisdiction, strategy, returns & volatility, sharpe ratios, and more.
• Developed the 21e6 Crypto Sector Indices, a novel approach to invest into the crypto market. First investible products are planned to launch Q2 2023 as an exchange traded product, fully licensed and 1:1 physically backed.

What has been the greatest challenge leading a start-up so far?

If I had to choose just one:

“The main challenge as an asset management start-up is the missing or short track-record for the offered investment products. Most investors abstain from investing as long as the track record is not at least between 12-36 months long. This requires a long period of interim financing before revenues can be generated and growth rates increase.”

What’s your typical day like?

• The day begins around 7:30am, usually reading or listening to a morning briefing from NYT or Handelsblatt, a major German business newspaper.
• Twice a week at 8:00am I have a brief check in call with the Board of Directors, just 15 to 20 minutes to go through any urgent topics.
• I schedule first calls around 9:30 to 10am, the time in between is used almost exclusively for e-mails & marketing work (writing articles, newsletters, creating new slides for upcoming keynotes or lectures).
• The majority of my day is spent in meetings with potential investors or clients. If something particular requires my undivided attention, I’ll be sure to block a couple of hours of ahead of time to focus on such tasks.
• Depending on what time I can fit in the gym, there is either an early or late dinner.
• The evening is therefore “reserved” for sports, cooking, reading, and family – although there are regularly some networking events that I attend, around once or twice a week… If there’s a backlog, it’s been quite helpful for me to sit back down from around 10:30pm to 12:00 after having spent the earlier evening for the things mentioned above.

What is the biggest lesson you’ve learnt from your fundraising journey?

Fundraising (especially as a new asset manager) in a bear market is the Ultramarathon of fundraising. 

While interest in the asset class and our work is not hard to find, closing an investment in a fund for this asset class can be a very long process that I underestimated at first. In particular, a lot of potential investors are still very new to crypto & digital assets and hence need a lot of education – which we gladly give them – but which takes time and effort.

Your advice to anyone starting out as an entrepreneur?

Something I learned from sports: There are always things that you cannot control (in sports, this could be the referee or an opposing player having an exceptionally great game). So, instead focus on the things that you can control: your team and the quality of your own work.

Maximilian Bruckner, Head of Sales & Marketing of 21e6 Capital

You can connect with Maximilian Bruckner on LinkedIn