Ophelia Snyder spent her early twenties making marine biology documentaries for the Discovery Channel. Now, at 29, she’s managing billions in a risky and volatile corner of finance.
Ophelia Snyder spent her early twenties making marine biology documentaries for the Discovery Channel. Now, at 29, she’s managing $US2.5 billion in a risky and volatile corner of finance.
She is having to confront several headwinds. Wood, a mentor to Snyder, is having a miserable start to 2022 as tech stocks sink and investors pull money from her flagship fund. And just in the past week crypto assets plunged as the Federal Reserve signalled interest rake hikes are ahead. The Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, doesn’t seem inclined to greenlight crypto ETFs anytime soon.
The risks “are elevated relative to traditional equity or fixed income products, so it’s easy to see how investors could lose money faster,” said Todd Rosenbluth, head of ETF and mutual fund research at CFRA Research. That such instruments can legally exist is due to the crypto-friendly regulatory environment in Switzerland, and especially the city of Zug, where 21Shares is based. The enclave, known as Crypto Valley, is home to hedge funds, commodity traders and now crypto companies, thanks to its low corporate taxes and favourable attitude toward blockchain technology. The city even allows citizens to pay taxes in Bitcoin and Ether.
In 2018, the two formed Amun — named after an Egyptian god — that initially packaged Bitcoin, Ethereum and other popular coins into a single fund that investors could track, listing it on the SIX Swiss Exchange in Zurich. Other baskets that tracked the performance of newer coins quickly followed.