Overview of the Alameda Research Foundation – Solana’s Crazy Fan
Provides information and in-depth analysis of the investment portfolio of the investment fund Alameda Research.
If you have to rank the “crazy” Solana funds, perhaps no one can beat Sam Bankman-Fried and the Alameda Research team. So how do they invest in Solana? Alameda’s portfolio is nothing special. If you read this article, you will understand.
Overview of Alameda Research
Alameda Research is an investment fund established in October 2017. They manage over $1B in digital assets and have a trading volume of around $1B – $10B per day across thousands of assets, from BTC to other Altcoins.
Alameda Research has a global footprint with the ability to trade on all major exchanges and markets.
Alameda is also one of the few companies with full-service projects. One of them is becoming a Market Maker, providing liquidity to around 35 of the top exchanges today. Or OTC with the advantage of low price deviation, high liquidity, … for any assets listed on the exchange.
Prominent members of Alameda Research
Sam Bankman – Fried – CEO of Alameda Research
Sam Bankman – Fried (SBF) is one of the biggest influencers with the current Crypto market. SBF is also the CEO of FTX – an exchange with an amazing growth rate, as well as a famous Futures field.
In Hurun’s report, SBF is the second richest person in the Crypto market, just behind Brian Armstrong – Co-Founder and CEO of Coinbase. Sam is also on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021.
On Twitter, SBF shows that he is not only a Builder, but also contributes a lot of information to the community. SBF is famous for its 10 – 20 Tweetstorms about issues in Crypto.
However, for some reason, the current Alameda Research team list does not contain the name of SBF. The high possibility is just to redistribute the roles in the Alameda collective and the FTX exchange. Anyhow, when it comes to Alameda, the first person that comes to mind is Sam Bankman – Fried.
Sam Trabucco – Co-CEO of Alameda Research
Sam Trabucco used to be a bond and ETF trader at SIG. He graduated from MIT in 2015 with degrees in math and computer science. Sam is one of those very active people on Twitter. Sam’s Tweets are often very helpful to the community.
Alameda Research Portfolio Overview
Below is an overview of Alameda Research Portfolio.
Next, we will take a look at a few outstanding projects of some Sectors.
All of the projects mentioned below have informative articles on idolmeta.net.
Asset Management
- dHEDGE: An asset management platform that allows users to copy other people’s trades. dHEDGE is built on Synthetix. dHEDGE raised capital for the first time in November 2020 with the presence of Framework Ventures, DeFiance Capital, Alameda Research,…
- Solrise: Similar project to dHEDGE but on Solana. Alameda participated in the Seed round in July 2021, along with Delphi Digital, Parafi,…
- Stacked: Asset management platform with over $4B of reported trading volume in early 2021. Alameda joined the project’s Seed round in September 2020.
- Prysm: An asset management platform, allowing users to track the activities of other investors to copy trades. Alameda invested in the September 2021 Seed round, along with Polychain and other funds.
⇒ Comment: The above projects have almost no difference. Of these, only dHEDGE has a token and has been around long enough to track ROI, DHT has a pretty bad growth (15x from ATH to ATL).
Aggregator
- 1inch: Crypto pioneer Aggregator platform, helping users get low slip trades, as well as good liquidity from multiple sources. 1inch has 3 rounds of funding:
- Seed (August 2020): Binance Labs, Alameda Research, Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly Capital
- Series A (December 2020): Pantera Capital, ParaFi Capital, Spartan Group,…
- They are gearing up for Series B with a valuation up to $2.25B.
- ParaSwap: 1inch analog liquidity pooling project. ParaSwap has two rounds of funding:
- Seed (9/2020): Alameda, CoinGecko, Arrington XRP Capital,…
- Extended Seed (May 2021): No big funds except for individuals like Andre Cronje of Yearn, Michael Egorov of Curve and Fredrik Haga of Dune Analytics.
⇒ Comment: Based on the indicators on Dune Analytics, we see that Alameda has chosen the right leader so far, which is 1inch, as well as ParaSwap – the project that holds the market share is not so bad.
But in terms of returns, the 1INCH token over the past year has only grown 11 times from ATL to ATH, a relatively low number. ParaSwap just released the token in November 2021, so there is not much data to comment on.
Yield Farming
- Alpha Finance: The leading project in the field of Farming combined with leverage. Did not find time invested Alameda.
- Tulip: Formerly known as Solfarm, an “Alpha Finance” on Solana. Tulip has had a fairly large growth in a short time, from July 2021 to November 2021 (33x from ATL to ATH). Alameda invested in the Seed round in October 2021 with Darren Lau of Not3Lau Capital (formerly at Spartan).
⇒ Comment: I can’t find data about Alameda’s investment in any round, nor does Alameda’s name on the Alpha Finance homepage. However, on Alameda’s homepage, there is Alpha Finance. This may be because Alameda bought in the secondary market, so the return on investment is unknown.
As for Tulip, there is not much conclusion when the capital call announcement was just released a month ago.
Analytics
- Dune Analytics: An extremely familiar project where you can track a lot of data not only in the project, but also in each Sector such as AMM market share, Lending,… These data are all user-generated uploaded, so it’s very decentralized and diverse. Dune Analytics has two funding rounds:
- Seed (9/2020): Dragonfly, Alameda, Multicoin, Hashed.
- Series A (August 2021): Dragonfly, Multicoin,…
- Messari: Very popular site in Crypto that not only provides quality research, but also news, market price data,… Messari has three rounds of funding:
- Seed (3/2018): No big investors.
- Unknown (11/2019): No major investors.
- Series A (August 2021): Alameda, Kraken exchange,…
⇒ Comment: In 2021, there are a lot of big funds investing in data analytics with projects like Dune Analytics, Messari, CryptoQuant,… Although it’s unclear whether these projects will issue tokens or not, but this shows that Alameda also has a common vision with other funds.
Wallet/Payment
- Coin98 Finance: Ecosystem of many DeFi products, featured with the first product being the Coin98 Wallet. Coin98 Wallet not only stores Multi-chain, but also helps you to participate in DeFi activities in just one application. Coin98 Finance has three rounds of funding:
- Seed (4/2021): Parafi, Multicoin, Hashed, CoinGecko.
- Strategic (April 2021): Alameda.
- Strategic (7/2021): Hashed, Spartan, Parafi, CoinGecko,…
- Mobilecoin: Mobile cryptocurrency payment platform. Mobilecoin has two rounds of funding:
- Series A (March 2021): No featured investors.
- Series B (August 2021): Alameda, Coinbase,…
- Math Wallet: All-in-one cryptocurrency wallet, Multichain support, including Layer 2 named Math chain. Math Wallet has two rounds of funding:
- Series A (October 2020): Alameda, Multicoin.
- Series B (December 2020): Binance Labs, Multicoin,…
- Liquality: Cryptocurrency wallet that allows Swap on wallet, Multi-chain support. Alameda invests in Seed round in August 2021 with the presence of Hashed, Coinbase,…
- XDEFI: Cryptocurrency wallet that supports NFT and Multi-chain. XDEFI has two rounds of funding:
- Seed (March 2021): Mechanism and other investors.
- Seed (9/2021): Alameda, CoinGecko, DeFiance, Animoca Brand,…
⇒ Comment: Most wallets are the same, that is, can do many tasks on a single application. In addition, the current market does not have too many multi-functional storage wallet products. Therefore, with a portfolio of 4 projects that are all wallets, it shows that Alameda is very interested in Crypto storage.
Derivatives
- Perpetual Protocol: One of the leading projects on current derivatives trading. Alameda invested in Seed round in August 2020, with the presence of Multicoin, Three Arrows Capital,…
- MCDEX: Decentralized Derivatives Exchange. MCDEX raised capital in May 2021, led by Alameda and Delphi Ventures, the rest are Multicoin, DeFiance,…
⇒ Comment: In September 2021, there was a wave of Fud from China that affected CEX exchanges. And DEX tokens during that time experienced a massive surge. Two of them, Perpetual’s PERP and MCDEX’s MCB, increased by 80% and 100% respectively in the following days.
Fund
Fund here means that Alameda becomes a Limited Partner, who pours capital for other funds to invest to earn profits. According to Infographic, Alameda is giving money to Multicoin, DeFiance, IOSG, Ethereal.
Exchanges
Unlike other funds that focus on DEX only, Alameda invests in a variety of trading platforms, including CEX, DEX, MEV Resistance and trading support applications (Trading Platform).
- AscendEX: The original name of AscendEX was Bitmax, founded in 2018. Alameda invested in Series B in March 2021. In this round there are not many big names except Polychain and Alameda.
- Blockfolio: In August 2020, FTX spent $150M to acquire Blockfolio, one of the popular Crypto asset management platforms on mobile. Founded in 2014, Blockfolio has over 6 million downloads. The Blockfolio news and portfolio tools average over 150 million impressions per month.
- SundaeSwap: DEX on Cardano. Alameda invests in Seed round in September 2021.
- Mercurial: “Curve” on Solana. Alameda invested in the Seed round in May 2021.
- ChainSwap: Cross-chain aggregation like Asset Bridge, Lending, NFT transfers in different chains. Invest in Strategic Round in April 2021.
- Dodo: DEX was born for a long time, then integrated many features such as Launchpad, token creation, …, with the investment of many big names such as Coinbase, Framwork, Three Arrows Capital,… Strategic round investment October 2020.
- Aldrin: The original name was Cryptocurrency.AI. Aldrin is a project that has both DEX and CEX exchanges. Alameda invests in Cryptocurrency.AI in May 2021
⇒ Comment: Alameda Research focuses on trading platforms, regardless of CEX or DEX. Speaking of DEXs specifically, Alameda invests in many different types of DEXs: Basic DEX (formerly DODO, SundaeSwap), StableSwap (Mercurial, mStable, Nerve, Aldrin), Bridge (ChainSwap), MEV (Eden, Hashflow).
This shows that not only the platform, but Alemeda also focuses on the problems of trading. The problems are Swap of Stablecoins, bridges between chains, … especially the problem of Bot front-run (MEV). There are many projects working in this area, and less funds are invested in such projects.
Combined with the derivatives segment analyzed earlier, it can be seen that Alameda invests a lot in trading platforms with similar amounts.
This shows that they do not focus on any niche in the transaction, but rather evenly distribute them for better risk management.
Infrastructure
- Solana: Alameda participated in a fundraising round in June 2021 with a total amount of up to $314M.
- Acala: EVM platform on Polkadot, and also the project that won the first Parachain slot on November 18, 2021. No information on Alameda’s investment round was found.
- SifChain: DEX exchange in the Cosmos ecosystem. Alameda invested in SifChain in August 2020.
- Immutable X: Layer 2 uses ZK Rollup for NFT. Immutable X has three rounds of funding with a total amount of nearly $90M.
- Seed (July 2018): Coinbase and other funds.
- Series A (September 2019): No outstanding funds.
- Series B (9/2021): Alameda and other funds.
- Syndica: A company dedicated to providing tools and services to the Solana dApp development community. Syndica also has 4 rounds of fundraising but is quite “weird” when the Seed round is behind Series A. In which, Alameda invests in the latest round but is Seed. Specifically:
- Pre-Seed (March 2021): No funds stand out.
- Community (7/2021): Fundraising from 100 members, including many prominent figures such as Baek Kim (Hashed), Bobby Ong (CoinGecko), Do Kwon (Terra),…
- Series A (August 2021): a16z and other funds.
- Seed (11/2021): Alameda, DeFiance, Spartan,…
- Clover: Layer 1 has EVM compatible Smart Contracts, as well as other utilities such as wallets, DeFi Hub. Clover is also one of the potential projects in winning the Parachain auction. No information found Alameda round investment.
- Composable: Cross-chain platform connecting other platforms, for example Layer 2 – Layer 2. Alameda invested in the Seed round of the project in June 2021. In this round there are not many special names except Alameda, Spartan, LongHash.
- Offchain Labs: The team behind Arbitrum. Offchain Labs had three rounds of funding, in which a total of $120M from Series A and Series B raised the company’s valuation to $1.2B:
- Seed (April 2019): Coinbase and other funds.
- Series A (a few days before Series B).
- Series B (August 2021): Alameda, Polychain, billionaire Mark Cuban,…
- Helium: This year, Helium is one of the projects with the biggest growth of Crypto when from the old bottom last year to this year’s ATH, HNT has increased nearly 500 times. With this strong boom, Alameda together with a16z, Multicoin invested in Helium’s last funding in August 2021 with a total amount of up to $111M.
- StarkWare: Another company known for its Layer 2 products using ZK RollUp. The company has three rounds of funding:
- Series A (October 2018): Paradigm, Sequoia, Coinbase, Multicoin, Consensys, Pantera,… Valuation of $36M after raising capital.
- Series B (March 2021): Paradigm, Three Arrow Capital,…
- Series C (11/2021): Paradigm, Three Arrow Capital, Alameda,… $2B valuation after raising capital.
⇒ Comment: Most of the most prominent infrastructure projects in Alameda’s portfolio will be invested in 2021. Some of them even have grown many times from the bottom (Helium) , Solana).
In addition, there are three notable names because it is not the project, but the project team, which are Syndica, Offchain Labs and StarkWare. The investment in Syndica and Solana shows that Alameda is very confident in Solana in the following years.
For two companies working in the Layer 2 array, Offchain Labs’ Arbitrum and StarkEX, StarkNET are both quite popular products among Layer 2.
Similar to other funds, Alameda also has deals for the Internet of Blockchains from Cosmos and Polkadot such as:
This shows that they also invest in Ethereum’s congestion-resolving infrastructure like Top-Tier funds. They invest quite a lot, not focusing on a single solution. The only problem is that they invest quite slowly, most of them in 2021.
Lending
- Parrot: This is the Lending platform that won the second prize of Solana x Serum Hackathon in 2021. Alameda invested in Parrot in the Seed round in June 2021.
- Jet Protocol: Maket Maker Lending project in Solana, has two rounds of funding:
- Seed (6/2021): Alameda, DeFiance, Parafi,…
- Extended Seed (11/2021): Paradigm, Three Arrows Capital, Solana Capital,…
- Oxygen: One of the first Lending projects on Solana. Alameda led the Strategic round in February 2021. Other funds in this round are Multicoin Capital, Genesis Capital, CMS.
- Alchemix: Alchemix is a Lending project with an interesting mechanism, that is, using collateral to make a profit and Repay the debt yourself. This is like we borrow interest from the future. Alameda led the Strategic round in March 2021.
- Anchor: Anchor is one of Terra’s core Lending projects, characterized by a fixed interest rate (~20% APY). Alameda investment time not found.
- Union: The Lending project is special because of its unsecured mechanism, but currently, it has not seen any outstanding activities. Alameda invested in November 2020.
- Liquity: Debt Protocol platform like Parrot and Alchemix, with Stablecoin LUSD is currently in the top 10 Stablecoins with the largest market capitalization. Liquity has two rounds of funding:
- Seed (9/2020): Polychain, DFINITY Ecosystem Fund,…
- Series A (March 2021): Pantera, Alameda,…
- Parallel: Lending project on Polkadot, currently has great potential to become the next Parachain winner. Parallel has three rounds of funding:
- Seed (6/2021): Polychain, Pantera,…
- Series A (August 2021): Polychain, Pantera, Alameda,…
- Strategic (11/2021): Sequoia,…
- Ratio: Debt Protocol applies LP token as collateral to mint USDr. This mechanism is quite famous nowadays, inspired by the Olympus DAO. Alameda invested in Seed round in July 2021.
- X-Margin: Unsecured Lending project for businesses. Alameda together with Polychain, Coinbase, Spartan,… invested in Series A in September 2021.
⇒ Comment: Similar to the Exchange section, the loan segment also has many types in Alameda’s investment portfolio, including unsecured loans, Debt Protocol, Market Maker, using LP to borrow, automatic repayment (Repay through interest from collateral).
Talking about the ecosystem, excluding Ethereum, Solana is the place where Alameda invests the most in the Lending segment with 25% of the total number of Lending projects.
NFT/Gaming
- Alethea AI: Metaverse project with interactive Intelligent NFTs (iNFTs). The project has two rounds of funding:
- Seed (1/2021): No featured funds.
- Unknown (August 2021): Coinbase, Alameda, Multicoin, Crypto.com, Mark Cuban,…
- Roco: GameFi Hub with popular features like NFT Marketplace, Launchpad,… Alameda invested in Seed or Private round in September 2021.
- GuildFi: Gaming Guild recently launched, similar to Yield Guild Game. Alameda invested in Seed round in November 2021, along with Hashed, Coinbase, DeFinance, Animoca Brand,…
- Genopets: The game features beautiful Pokemon-like beasts, as well as novel Move-to-Earn mechanics. Alameda invested in Seed round in October 2021, along with Spartan, Yield Guild Game, Anomoca Brand,…
- DeFi Land: Farm theme game on Solana with fun and cute images, received great attention from the community. Alameda invested in Seed round in September 2021, together with Animoca Brand, Solana Foundation,…
⇒ Comment: The NFT/Gaming projects in Alameda’s Portfolio are also very diverse, each with their own strengths, such as Guild, Metaverse, Hub with many features and breakthrough mechanisms (Move-to-Earn). ). In general, there is no common ground in terms of the nature of these projects.
Social
- Subsocial: The social network project on Polkadot, can imagine Subsocial as a decentralized version of Reddit, Meidum,… Alameda invested in Seed round in July 2021.
- Chingari: A social network from India, built on the Solana platform, helping users share Short Videos like Tiktok. In 2021, they raised capital 4 times from 2020 to 2021, details are unknown. The last fundraising in October 2021 with the participation of Alameda, Solana Capital, Kraken exchange,…
- Only1: A social network on Solana. Only1 has a funding round in July 2021 with the participation of Alameda and other investors.
- Solcial: Another social network on Solana. Alameda invested in Seed round in September 2021, with the participation of Solana Foundation and other funds.
⇒ Comment: This is a very new segment, haven’t seen a breakthrough or interest from the community. While other funds have not invested or invested little, Alameda has 4 representatives. And out of 4 names, 3/4 use Solana as a platform to build projects. It’s still too new to comment on social opportunities.
But with the data theft scandals of centralized social platforms today, it is quite understandable to invest in these Deals by Alameda.
Liquidity
- Lido: One of the first, and most successful platforms in Liquid Staking, with stETH having an FDV of around $6B. After rolling out Liquid Staking for Terra’s LUNA, Lido is also looking to his next target, Solana. The latest funding in May 2021 with the participation of Alameda, Paradigm, Coinbase, Delphi Digital,…
- pSTAKE: A Liquid Staking project just launched on Persistence under Cosmos. Alameda invested in Seed round in November 2021, with the participation of Sequoia, DeFinance, Three Arrows Capital, Kraken exchange, Spartan,…
- Sommelier: Liquidity management project when adding your pool. Sommelier has two rounds of funding:
- Seed (March 2021): Multicoin, Alameda,…
- Series A (October 2021): Polychain, Alameda,…
- Serum: Liquidity foundation of many projects on Solana. Right from the inception of the project, the name Alameda appeared on the homepage of Serum.
- Ren Protocol: One of the bridges between famous chains with renBTC. In February 2021, Alameda officially acquired Ren.
⇒ Comment: Liquid Staking is a quite fertile market when it increases capital efficiency. Therefore, Alameda believes in Lido, the Winner project in this field, in the long term.
Just by reading some of the above, you can see that Alameda focuses a lot on Solana. But here they choose pSTAKE – Liquid Staking project for Cosmos, while their Cosmos Deals are not so prominent. Therefore, pSTAKE is a rather confusing deal in my opinion.
Other
This item has a relatively large name, which is Consensys. Consensys is a company with many products, one of which is Metamask – a name that is too familiar to the Crypto community.
Consensys has two funding rounds with a total amount of up to $265M, with the participation of Mastercard, The Maker Foundation (MakerDAO), Parafi, Dragonfly, Coinbase, Spartan,…
Ecosystems in Alameda Research Portfolio
From the above comments, we can see that Alameda invests in quite a few ecosystems: Cosmos, Polkadot,… But most of the resources go to Solana, so in this section I will focus on Solana.
Alameda and Solana
I will review what Alameda currently has in Solana, which project is leading to call for capital, along with the investment time:
- Layer 1: Solana (June 2021).
- Infrastructure: Syndica (November 2021).
- Asset Management: Solrise (July 2021).
- Yield Farming: Tulip (10/2021 – leading).
- Stablecoins: UXD (September 2021).
- Wallet: Coin98 Wallet (4/2021), Math Wallet (10/2020 – leading).
- Derivatives: Drift (October 2021).
- Synthetic: Synthetify (June 2021).
- Lending: Oxygen (2/2021 – leading), Parrot (6/2021), Jet (6/2021).
- NFT/Gaming: Genopets (October 2021), DeFi Land (9/2021), Burnt Finance (May 2021).
- Social: Chingari (10/2021), Only1 (7/2021), Solcial (9/2021).
- Liqudity: Lido (5/2021), Serum (August 2020), Ren (2/2021).
- DEX: Mercurial (May 2021), Aldrin (May 2021).
- Prediction: Hedgehog Market (July 2021).
- Map: Maps.me (2/2021 – leading).
Thereby, we can draw the following conclusions:
- Alameda is very “Bullist” Solana, the number of projects on Solana accounts for about 21% of the total projects in the Portfolio.
- Despite being quite fond of Solana and well known in the community, there are very few projects in Solana where Alameda led the funding round (4/25 projects). Even, not only Solana, but other projects also have a low lead rate.
- Alameda’s investment in the Solana platform itself is only almost full (June 2021).
That’s what I see from Alameda’s Portfolio. Is this also the vision of SBF?
SBF and Solana
If you have joined Crypto since the end of 2020, you probably know more or less about the “super huge” token payment up to 91.47% of the total supply on January 7, 2021. This number can kill Solana if discharged at the same time.
At the very moment that FUD mushroomed, SBF made a bet with a Fudder: “SOL is currently $2.05, and in that week will never be less than $2.05”. You can see details here.
Around mid-2020, Sam showed his engineering team what Solana was capable of, and everyone was amazed and realized Solana’s potential. Then, in July 2020, Sam announced that he would build a DEX on Solana. It’s not unusual for a DEX to be built on Blockchain, but the important thing is that the person behind this DEX is Sam. And that is the current Serum.
This shows that Sam has seen Solana’s potential a long time ago, not just seeing the opportunity recently.
Alameda Research Portfolio Review
Performance
The top 5 projects with the best performing Tokens (price of ATH compared to ATL) are:
- SOL: 51.992%
- HNT: 48.566%
- MCB: 7.512%
- PERP: 3.647%
- TULIP: 3,158%
Investment trends of Alameda Research
In 2021, Alameda has invested in about 70 projects, which is quite a large number compared to other funds such as a16z (50), Hashed (31), Delphi Ventures (20),…
Based on the image above, it can be seen that Alameda focuses on arrays such as NFT/Gaming, Lending, Infrastructure. And of course, most of it is located in Solana. This can be explained by the fact that Solana only really has a huge ecosystem.
Stories around Alameda Research
In this part, I will talk about a few issues surrounding Alameda’s gameplay through the following information:
Alameda and Reef Finance
On March 8, 2021, Alameda agreed to an agreement to buy Reef Finance’s REEF at a below market price. This is a very normal thing when a fund wants to buy the project’s tokens at a cheaper price, but there are a few conditions. For example, divided into two sales such as Reef Finance.
Surprisingly, right after receiving the token, Alameda sold the first batch of tokens on Binance immediately. Subsequently, Reef Finance canceled the second token sale.
Despite the fact, Alameda did not say that he wanted to invest in Reef Finance, but just wanted to buy OTC and sell to eat the price difference, but this incident partly shows that Alameda does not always buy tokens to invest in the project. judgment.
Alameda and Avalanche
If you search for the keyword “Alameda $JOE” on Twitter, you will see many results talking about Alameda having farmed JOE and PNG tokens to release. For example, Tweet you can refer here.
I’m not saying farming and discharging is wrong, because we all want profit in this market, but Alameda is a big fund, and they will farm for a good amount of money.
If these tokens are released when the project is still weak, it will most likely make the project unable to develop in the short term. And Sam Trabucco himself also confirmed that they like Yield Farming in his interview.
Through the above examples, it can be seen that Alameda in addition to investing in fundraising rounds, they are quite active in participating in making short-term profits in projects, especially being able to farm out tokens.
Summary
From the above analysis, the following conclusions can be drawn:
- Alameda Research is a “crazy fan” of Solana, almost present in the puzzle pieces on Solana.
- They rarely lead the round.
- Besides the familiar pieces, Alameda also invests in an area that few big funds pay attention to: Social networks.
- Alameda in addition to investing in rounds for funds, they also participate in seeking profits in external projects, through Farming, OTC,…
Above is an overview of the Portfolio and some comments on investment trends of Alameda Research, if you have any other questions or comments, please comment below to discuss with idolmeta.net !