Galvin is a former JP Morgan executive, who left the investment bank in 2017 to start up DACM alongside Bitcoin veteran Gabriel Abed. The firm runs three different funds, all focused on digital assets, managing over $750 million primarily from high net worth individuals and sophisticated-investor family offices.

Last Friday, the firm launched a wholesale-only offering for Australian investors, a long-only fund that invests directly in crypto assets such as Luna, Solana, Bitcoin and Ethereum. So far, interest has been immense, Galvin says, and understandably so given DACM’s global digital asset fund has grown tenfold over the past 12 months.

“The message that we’ve been getting is there’s a huge demand for people to be involved in this asset class. There’s a lot of FOMO [fear of missing out] on the one side, but on the other side there’s still a lot of nervousness around the volatility and regulation in the space,” Galvin says.

Galvin and his executive team, including former UBS Asset Management chief executive Bryce Doherty, have backgrounds in investment banking and financial services. Being able to position itself as a professional and experienced money manager helps DACM address investor concerns and present itself as a safe way for investors to gain access to the booming crypto asset class.

But DACM isn’t all technical analysis and number-crunching, far from it. Galvin’s research team is made up of half commercial-focused, financial services types, and half tech-focused, blockchain and crypto whizzes.

These two halves work in tandem to not only identify potential investment opportunities from a finance fundamentals sense but in a technical capacity too, taking advantage of the open-source and public nature of blockchain technology to determine if projects have the capacity to scale and achieve their (sometimes ambitious) roadmaps.

“We have a watching brief over a couple of hundred assets,” Galvin says. “Then if we see an opportunity where there might be a growth aspect to one of those coins that makes it look undervalued, we swing the research team in to do a much deeper dive.”

The tech team will then spin up what’s known as a node, effectively a computer server that processes and validates transactions on a blockchain network. Galvin says this not only allows the team to analyse the project’s code to ensure it’s robust but also gets them talking to the asset’s development team to see how the project is run at the coalface.

Galvin’s unique approach puts DACM above cryptocurrency investors who pursue a more “momentum-driven” approach of day trading the latest and greatest crypto assets in an effort to make a quick buck.

“The fact that there are so many people focused on the short term is not a bad thing for us,” Doherty says.

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“Partly it’s those momentum players, God bless them, that create some of that inefficiency that gave us these opportunities,” Galvin agrees.

However, while Galvin and his team at DACM might make it sound easy, investing in crypto assets comes with an array of various difficulties, most notably the lack of consistent or easily accessible information on potential investments.

“There are no brokers, there’s no research. The leads of these projects won’t set up a broker lunch and sit around a table to explain what they’re doing to you,” he says. “But the information can be really accessible if you know how to get it.”

Persistent volatility is another risk the DACM team have to weather, with the crypto market prone to stomach-wrenching drops seemingly unprompted, requiring strong nerves and steady hands.

“The market as a whole fell, from peak to trough, by over 55 per cent through May. That’s more than the GFC,” Galvin says. “And being a fiduciary of other people’s money, it’s not an easy environment sitting here watching my screen and watching the market fall 55 per cent.”

“That’s why I bring that modelling mindset to what we do because, in that period where the price crashes like that, if you don’t have something fundamental to hold on to, and you’re just buying momentum, the Emperor’s got no clothes.”

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