|
Matthias Knab, Opalesque for New Managers: A hedge fund running a basis trade on a centralized exchange can pull its trade history through an API and reconcile its books by the close. A fund running the same capital through DeFi lending, restaking and looping strategies has no such luxury. Every transaction arrives as raw blockchain data, and what it means depends on which of thousands of protocols it touched.
That gap is the business of Renesis, a portfolio management and accounting platform for on-chain funds that started building about a year ago. Its team spent the previous five years building custom trading infrastructure for fund managers, Thomas Pratter, founder of Renesis, said in an interview with Opalesque.
"The need and the importance of having trusted, verified track records for allocators became very, very obvious for us in the last year," he said. The name fuses "genesis" and "renaissance."
Why on-chain books break
In traditional markets, and even on centralized digital asset exchanges, the menu of activity is short: spot, derivatives, options, perhaps an earn product. "When you get an API connectivity to an exchange or a broker and you're reading the trade and transfer history, you essentially have all the data to predictably reconcile a PnL, an NAV and other performance metrics," he said. "That's what's been known for years and decades."
On-chain, that shortcut does not exist. "There is no way where you can just query the trade history of your account," he said. "What you get is essentially raw on-chain data, where each individual transaction could have tens of thousands of different meanings and impacts, depending on which protocol it interacted with. Every protocol has their own rules and their own unique characteristics."
Renesis ingests that raw data, maps how each smart-contract interaction affects cost basis, positions and profit and loss, and reconciles it - together with activity on centralized exchanges - into a single ledger. The goal is a record the manager can run the fund on and an allocator can verify during due diligence.
Institutional tooling on an emerging-manager budget
The company is aiming squarely at emerging managers. A fund charging two and twenty on USD10 million of assets cannot afford the enterprise infrastructure vendors built for much larger funds, he said. Renesis gives those managers a reconciled NAV, P&L attribution and investor reporting. It has signed distribution partnerships with Kraken and with Enzyme, the on-chain fund management platform, and won the Cointelegraph Startup Competition at EthCC.
It is also trying to solve the distribution problem. Renesis currently works with a network of 10 to 15 allocators, mainly digital asset funds of funds and high-net-worth investors, concentrated in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Middle East and North Africa rather than the US. Together with digital asset rating agency Bluechip, it is building what it calls the Allocators Network, a database where allocators can find managers whose performance has been verified through Renesis data.
"The largest capital migration in history"
Renesis is betting that demand for this kind of plumbing will grow as traditional assets move onto blockchains. Digital asset trading lived almost entirely on centralized exchanges until early DeFi protocols emerged around 2017; the "DeFi summer" boom then made on-chain lending, borrowing and yield vaults mainstream. Now tokenized equities and tokenized money market funds are arriving on-chain, and he cited industry forecasts of as much as USD30 trillion in traditional assets moving on-chain by 2030. Estimates vary widely.
The bigger shift, in his view, is what tokenization does to regulated assets. Equities that once traded only during exchange hours become tradable around the clock, and venues such as Hyperliquid open them to anyone with blockchain access rather than a limited group of accredited participants. More liquidity and more price discovery, he argued, should make those markets more efficient. Stablecoins, alongside perpetual futures exchanges and tokenized equities, have been among the sector's clearest winners, used both as a store of value and to move money across borders at low cost.
None of that capital arrives, he said, without the controls allocators already expect. Bringing TradFi money on-chain "requires the rigor and the robustness of systems that you're used to from TradFi," he said. "This is where we are building with Renesis."
Renesis also runs an Emerging Manager Program for digital asset funds building their first track record. Managers interested in joining can reach out via info@renesis.fi.
|
RSS
