Ex-Citi executives formed a crypto-focused investment firm to help clients make bets on digital assets.
Alex Kriete, Greg Girasole, and Frank Cavallo lead Motus Capital Management. Krote and Girasole previously headed Citi’s digital assets division, and Cavallo was the bank’s director and investment counselor overseeing about $8 billion in assets for the bank.
“In order to merge our goal of building the solutions our clients were asking for with our expertise in the crypto space, we left traditional finance to create Motus,” the firm told CoinDesk.
MOTUS sees an opportunity in the growing segment of the market, where larger investment firms cannot purchase smaller market cap tokens for liquidity purposes, while fund sizes under $100 million will likely “lack the guardrails we want, and economically their main incentive is gathering assets,” Cavallo said.
“We’ve decided not to make tradeoffs and instead align interests by putting enough skin in the game ourselves to incentivize both proper fiduciary controls and rightsizing the fund.” Based on the current opportunity set identified, Cavallo suggested that Motus’ growth fund be around $100 million in size.
According to Motus, income-focused strategies face a “mismatch” between traditional financing and digital assets. “Global banks have so much cash they pay zero or less for deposits. Meanwhile, the stablecoin market cap has quintupled since 2021, and investors still command high-single to double-digit returns for dollars or dollar-pegged assets.” Cavallo sees this as an opportunity.
Both growth and income funds are only available to qualified buyers.
In a Friday afternoon report, Bloomberg reported that Motus had raised $100 million since its launch on Thursday.
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