Two enterprising philanthropists are building a cryptocurrency investment fund that not only delivers consistent growth for investors that can withstand market fluctuations but also pay it forward by giving a large percentage of their profits to highly effective charities and other altruistic endeavors.
Aaron Mayer and his partner David Hu apply their combined 15+ years of experience with blockchain technology and digital assets to ensure that their Open Heart Capital fund routinely achieves eye-catching positive returns for investors, and then they donate a significant percentage of their performance fees to charities that help those most in need. "We're a market-neutral crypto fund with a purpose," says Mayer.
The fund is almost entirely quantitative and algorithmic, blending a combination of arbitrage and mean reversion strategies to achieve risk-adjusted returns that vastly outperform the simple buy-and-hold approach. The algorithm makes short-term intraday trades, meaning that the fund isn't exposed to the roller coaster of the market. Currently, the fund currently averages a monthly profit for investors of 11 percent, with an annual profit of around 226 percent.
The stability of the Open Heart Capital fund is one of the biggest draws for investors, who might otherwise be deterred by recent press reports on the collapse of several digital currencies. The fund is designed to withstand short-term market fluctuations, including the potential fallout from the Ethereum "merge" to a far more energy-efficient way of generating that digital coin.
A leading reason behind the merge is that Ethereum is switching to a digital currency mining process that will require much less power, and less energy demand means reduced greenhouse gas emissions - exactly the kind of forward-thinking view driving the Open Heart Capital fund.
The algorithms for the fund were developed by Hu, an early bitcoin investor in 2011, in concert with a team of quants at another New York-based trading desk who have a combined 30 years of experience managing billion-dollar funds in the traditional equities markets. Hu is a gifted engineer who has won multiple AI competitions, and he is perhaps most well-known for being asked by the Obama administration to join the resuscitation team of the healthcare.gov website after its failed launch in 2013.
"Running the fund with David has been extremely fulfilling, as it gives us a chance to combine our intellectual passions with our heart-centered philanthropic mission," says Mayer.
Mayer, who handles the fund's operations and investor relations, is also the founder of Impact Labs, which is a social impact technology community helping more than 10,000 young engineers develop their skills. He has also previously given a TEDx Talk on the "moral imperative of using technology to better society" - something the fund aims to achieve.
Mayer and Hu initially met through mutual friends in the effective altruism community, a movement dedicated to using evidence and data to drive philanthropic decision-making. "Think of it like maximizing ROI, but for your charitable dollars," says Mayer, who has publicly capped his salary at $70,000 and intends to donate anything above that amount. "Effective altruists look for the lowest hanging fruit where they can get the most bang for their buck, and that tends to lead to charitable interventions like mosquito nets for people living in malaria-prone countries."
Mayer and Hu are applying their first-rate knowledge of the digital asset world and their unique skills to ensure profit for investors and consistent donations to charities, even in the face of cryptocurrencies that have had chaotic histories and unpredictable futures.
"The returns of the fund have been extremely impressive," says Mayer. "But we didn't start the fund because we want to be rich, we started the fund because we believe it can have a really positive impact on the world."
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