Introduction
Since the announcement of the Proposed Investment Hub Roadmap, it’s been somewhat quiet from our side. While work has been going on in the background, we are definitely due to provide an update on the various topics.
Please let us know any comments and we will be happy to discuss in detail.
Investment Hub Team
The Investment Hub has grown in size from 3 to 7, with a portion of the hub’s efforts going into discussing roles, onboarding the new members and implementing collaboration tools. In addition to myself, @aleks and @nsantini, the Nexus Mutual members listed below (alongside their short bios) are now contributors to the hub:
- (@Dopeee)
I worked for many years in private equity, before transitioning to corporate operations. I’m an active special situations investor, with a particular passion for internet companies and SaaS, which led me to crypto. I’m a Discord moderator for Nexus Mutual, an active participant in the community and create a periodic newsletter for our members. Going forward, I hope to identify further investment opportunities for the Mutual and to maintain an active collaboration and open communication with our members.
- Gauthier (@Gauthier)
Former M&A analyst, I have moved on to invest in Real Estate. However, during the first lockdown in 2020, I dived deep into the crypto rabbit-hole and have been investing with a strong focus on DeFi protocols ever since. I’m serving as a discord moderator in the Nexus community, and as a multisig signer for the Community Fund. I have been a very vocal advocate for Nexus on Twitter, and also wrote a guide about Nexus tokenomics back in January. I have a strong vested interest in Nexus and going forward, I aim to identify what are the best investment opportunities for the mutual.
- Guillaume (@oSaaT )
Business professional with more than 15 years’ experience, and with a good analytical and structured approach to all types of problems. My skills in project management and risk management can be complementary to the profiles of the initial team. Also a retail investor in both DeFi & TradFi (a long-time investor in insurance stocks). I’d like to keep contributing to the IH around both set-up/structure as well as the process to surface and implement direct DeFi investments in line with the strategy.
- Jacob Cantu (@JC1 )
Insurance investment portfolio manager with a master’s degree in quantitative finance. I have a passion for identifying and investing in unique business models with asymmetric upside, and I enjoy getting involved in the projects in which I invest. I began my crypto deep-dive in early 2020 and am still learning! I hope to help the mutual develop, refine, and continuously evolve an investment strategy that safely generates steady investment income while preserving capital invested.
We feel this is now a good number of permanent hub members, providing a varied set of perspectives and areas of expertise.
Investment Hub Budget and Charter
In the original roadmap, we proposed that all contributions to the hub would be on a voluntary basis, but the amount of planning, due diligence, research and ongoing communications required have since made us revise this view. We are therefore going to put forward an incentive structure for contributions.
Look out for the following to be posted in the Community Fund grant section in the coming weeks with a view to proceeding to snapshot voting.
- hub charter
- hub budget, including a mechanism for allocating the rewards among members in proportion to their contribution.
Investment Philosophy
The draft Investment Philosophy is almost complete and we expect it to be published imminently. This document captures our thinking with regards to categorisation of investments, risk management, asset-liability management, return targets and benchmarking.
After modifying to incorporate Nexus member comments and finalising, we expect this document to guide our investment recommendations in the future.
RfPs
We have analyzed with great care the proposals which came in as a result of our RFP and have had detailed follow-up conversations with potential external managers.
We are still in ongoing discussions with a number of teams and will provide an update if/when a potential manager is worth presenting to the community.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of the respondents, most of which are centralised, regulated entities, we are unable to share full details of responses with the community. However, the ability of the respondents to provide transparency and have ongoing channels of open communication with the membership base remains one of our key criteria in selecting potential managers. We are typically suggesting open member AMAs to any RfP respondent as a means of eventually communicating the details of the proposal to the wider Nexus membership.
While the deadline for the original RfP has lapsed, we’re still happy to hear proposals from any interested parties.
ETH2 Staking
The initial investment in Lido has been a success and has thus far generated 248 stETH for the mutual.
The Investment Hub has therefore put forward a proposal to increase our investment, just published here. As always, there will be a consultation period before the proposal proceeds to governance.
We see ETH2 staking as the cornerstone investment for Nexus (and a benchmark that external managers would need to outperform in ETH terms). Therefore, the hub members are monitoring additional alternatives in order to limit the specific risk to Lido.
Other Direct Investments
We see Nexus as being a core element of DeFi on Ethereum, so we are researching opportunities, risks and technical challenges for direct investments in DeFi.
Gauthier and Guillaume are working on exploring a number of strategies, among them the most promising:
- LP for the wNXM/ETH pool on Uniswap v3. Note that this would also involve the mutual ‘buying back’ wNXM to some extent.
- Passive/index strategy (such as Holding a portion of DPI by Index Coop)
- Exploring executing strategies and/or delegating to managers through vaults via Asset Management protocols (Enzyme, dHedge, Babylon) or aggregators, in order to reduce technical effort for integration by our core developers.
Community members, if there are any other strategies that you would like to see us explore further, don’t hesitate to reach out directly or leave a reply below.