COSIMO X Managing Partner Ciarán Hynes On Digital Assets And What's Next

The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

Co-founder and Managing Partner at COSIMO X, Ciarán Hynes, was at the Digital Asset Summit in New York this week. The firm he leads specializes in blockchain technology and digital assets. He is also a serial entrepreneur and investor. We caught up with him to learn more about his outlook on the event, the industry, and the companies he works with. 

Hi Ciarán, what brings you to New York?

Well, I'm attending the Digital Asset Summit here. It's great to be back at the conference again after COVID disrupted so many things over the last year and a half. So great to be back networking with people in the industry and learning about the new developments.

What are your impressions of the Digital Asset Summit so far?

The first thing that I would say is that this is a very institutionally focused conference. There's a lot of traditional finance companies here, which traditionally you wouldn't have seen at crypto conferences or a Digital Asset Summit before. A lot of the discussions are around how to bridge DeFi, decentralized finance, with the traditional finance world. A lot of talk about yield as well. And then, of course, the usual talk about the different risks involved, regulatory risk. It's been a really well-run conference and a very interesting one so far.

Do you think this is a pivotal year for institutional interest in digital assets?

You've got the big names here. BNY Mellon is here, Goldman Sachs is here... Those are newer players in this marketplace. It's interesting to see those types of companies here as well as JP Morgan.

What brings your firm, COSIMO X, to the Digital Asset Summit?
We’re one of the leading investors. We've got the first and only evergreen tokenized venture fund in the world that invests in the blockchain space. We do a lot in DeFi and finance. We're here to learn and to keep ourselves up to date with the developments in the industry and to stay on top of things on behalf of our LPs. That's primarily the reason we're here.

COSIMO X is an investor in ndau. Tell us about how the adaptive digital currency’s recent partnership with Investview has worked out.

The partnership with Investview has been fantastic. Through its subsidiary, iGenius, we now have over 10,000 ndau wallet holders in over 40 countries. iGenius have been extremely successful in getting ndau to their broad marketing network throughout the world. It’s nearly 40,000 strong at this point. 

They've been really successful in promoting ndau to new audiences and emerging markets. In fact, as we're speaking, my colleague Rob Frasca will be talking to a conference of 5,000 people in Egypt, with another 25,000 listenings in virtually. That has been arranged by the iGenius group out of that part of the world. It's pretty incredible the way that they can bring their network together for something like ndau, which is designed to be a true long-term store of value.

What led Investview to invest in ndau?
They're very experienced in this area because they're one of the largest Bitcoin miners in the US. When we started working with them on ndau, they said, “Well, we have a lot of Bitcoin on our balance sheet. Why wouldn't we have ndau as a nice diversified play?” That's why they made the investment directly in ndau itself. In fact, they incentivize their team using ndau also. They are very much strong partners of ours and we're delighted to be working with them.

What can we expect from COSIMO X and its investments in the near future? 
We're continuing to be very active in making investments. We invested recently in a company called Integral, a decentralized exchange. They just launched today and they've gone up about 4X from what we invested at. That's just one that I would point to that’s very relevant right at this moment. 

What we want to do is find other exciting companies. We're early-stage investors so we want to find emerging companies in the space that we really think can go places. That's certainly something we're going to continue to do. 

Then, of course, because we're an evergreen fund, we're going to continue to raise money. There's huge interest in this space now. I think at the end of this month we'll be close to 30 million in AUM, up from 12 million less than a year ago. That's something else that we're going to be really focused on on the COSIMO side: bringing more and more institutions, quite frankly. 

We're very lucky to have Rochester Institute of Technology as one of our key LPs. They came in very early. We'd love to see more University endowments come in and more institutions come into the fund as well.

Tell us about ndau being added to the Messari Registry.
For people who don't know, Messari is really the Bloomberg of the crypto world. We're thrilled that ndau is listed there and that they will be tracking developments in the whole ndau ecosystem. Again, very delighted with that partnership.

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The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.