$1 Million In Seed Capital Awarded To DeFi Hedge Fund Boreal, Bitcoin Alpha Competition Winner

In Bitcoin 2024 last July, Samara Alpha Management and Bitcoin Pro Magazine Selected northerna market-neutral DeFi hedge fund, was named this year’s award winner Bitcoin Alpha Contest.

Boreal has secured $1 million in seed capital as well as access to Samara’s institutional-grade infrastructure to help manage its fund.

Boreal rose to prominence due to its trading strategy, which uses various DeFi protocols to generate yield in addition to USD, Bitcoin, and Ether.

“Even when things are very bearish, there is always a way to make returns in DeFi,” said Boreal founder Evan Morris, who has been in the cryptocurrency space since 2016 and who worked in traditional finance before that.

“I started in this space four years ago managing offshore funds with a couple of friends, then I ended up joining a larger firm as a portfolio manager where I ran DeFi strategy for a few years. Most recently, I launched Boreal, and now, with Samara’s help, we can really scale up.” Take things to the next level.

Adel Abdel-Aali, Chief Investment Officer at Samara Asset Management Company and one of the jury members in the competition, commented on why Samara was excited to partner with Boreal.

“Evan is someone with a very good track record and the right risk framework for this type of strategy,” he said. “He has business maturity, and since cryptocurrencies are a young market, it is rare to have someone with several years of DeFi experience.”

Al-Abd Al-Aali also shared details about how Samara plans to support Maurice.

“We thought if there was a way to quickly get it through all the infrastructure like administration, auditing, accounting, signup documents, bank account, BitGo accounts, etc. – all of which we have – let’s do it.” He said.

Decentralized Finance on Bitcoin

Going forward, Morris sees Bitcoin playing a much bigger role in the DeFi space.

“With the emergence of bitcoin in the DeFi scene, we are able to do some of the same things that we have been able to do with stablecoins over the past few years,” he said.

“DeFi 1.0 was heavily based on USDC and Tether, but the future of DeFi will include different types of bitcoin derivatives and wrapped bitcoin. We are excited to provide liquidity.”

Al-Abdali also feels that Bitcoin will play a bigger role in decentralized finance, and his company is well-positioned to help Boreal capitalize on that.

“Bitcoin is not like all other coins – it is one of the best collaterals out there,” he said.

“We use bitcoin in our bitcoin-denominated fund, which we started over a year ago and which uses essentially the same type of strategies as our dollar-denominated market-neutral fund. However, the fund is entirely in bitcoin.

“The idea is to use Bitcoin in new DeFi protocols such as Babylon In market making strategies rather than placing collateral like USDC or USDT on the exchange.

The future of decentralized finance

Morris explained that decentralized finance is much more advanced than it was four years ago, when it first appeared on the scene as a sector of cryptocurrencies.

“There are a lot of tools to get alerts on smart contracts and assess the security of smart contracts,” he said.

“The cybersecurity and wallet technology is also much better. This enables DeFi products at an institutional level,” he added.

Al-Abdali wants to see Boreal leverage institutional-level DeFi before institutions arrive.

“All this new institutional capital won’t touch DeFi for a while,” Al-Abdali explained. “They’ve barely made it to Bitcoin, so it’s going to be a long time before the DeFi scene becomes saturated and there’s a lot of capital,” he added.

“There will be some exciting returns for some of us who are willing to play in the space now.”