Proprietary digital asset trading firm LedgerPrime has managed to raise $12 million in funding with another $8 million guaranteed, according to a report from CoinDesk.
LedgerPrime chief investment officer Shiliang Tang told the publication on Thursday that “the raise is reflective of LedgerPrime’s track record and success through the 2018 crypto crash, and shows the opportunity associated with trading cryptocurrency derivatives and the demand for strategies that can generate returns in both bear and bull markets.”
Notably, LedgerPrime is owned by Ledger Holdings Inc., which is also the owner of crypto futures platform LedgerX. LedgerPrime began offering trading in the cryptocurrency spot and derivatives markets in Q4 of 2017.
The firm is based in New York and led by Tang, who acts as LedgerPrime’s Chief Investment Officer, and Dr. Johannes van Ziejts, who holds a position as the company’s Chief Technology Officer.
Contrary to what some people might believe…I expect #cryptocurrencies to behave much better in a risk on than a risk off market…similar to $gld (gold) during the 2008 financial crisis, when cash was king during market turmoils and gold sold off like all other assets…
— Shiliang Tang (@ShiliangTang) February 21, 2019
Tang is also the Cofounder and COO of “insurtech” startup WorldCover and has eight years of experience as a derivatives trader at UBS and Merrill Lynch. Van Zeijts is a founding partner of Sibyl Trading and a Portfolio Manager for Quantbot Technologies, and spent ten years as a senior quant developer at Merill Lynch and Credit Suisse.
The firm also counts Bitcoin Core developer Bryan Bishop and JPMorgan “dealmaker” and fund operator James Greenberg as advisors.
LedgerX Recently Launched a New Binary Option “Unique to Bitcoin”
LedgerPrime’s sister company, LedgerX, made news in early February when it launched what it claims is a new kind of derivative contract that is unique to Bitcoin.
According to a blog post by the company, the “LedgerX Halving Contract” is a binary option that settles to the next time that the Bitcoin mining reward is cut in half. (A binary option describes a contract in which the payoff is either a fixed amount or nothing at all.)
The #LXHC: a binary option that allows you to get a fixed payoff if the next halving block happens before a certain date. The countdown to #630,000 begins pic.twitter.com/vHbupelj2F
— LedgerX (@ledgerx) February 6, 2019
Indeed, the LedgerX Halving Contract “will allow you to get a fixed payoff if the next halving block (#630,000) happens before a certain date and time. If the block is discovered after, the contract expires at zero.”
At the rate that transactions are being processed at the current moment, Bitcoin’s mining reward is cut in half roughly one time every four years. The last Bitcoin halving occurred in 2016 when the Bitcoin reward decreased from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC.
