Osprey CEO Greg King is Fully Committed to Digital Assets

As traditional financial and digital assets markets are slowly merging, Blockworks is taking a closer look at how fund managers are navigating the volatile market.

I spoke with Osprey Funds’ co-founder and CEO Greg King, CFA, about what sets the digital asset investment firm apart from competitors and how they appeal to their investors. The fund operates with approximately 15 employees and $115 million AUM, as of interview time. 

King has taken both his interest in crypto and traditional finance experience to help found Osprey in 2018. Previously, he worked as Head of Exchange Traded Products at Credit Suisse and held key positions at Barclays Capital. King received his MBA from University of California Davis.

Osprey has launched three funds (so far) for investors, including their Bitcoin Trust, Algorand Trust and Polkadot Trust.

King, CFA, says the company has plans to offer clients even more investment options in the future.

Chittum: What gives Osprey Funds an edge over competitors like Grayscale? How do you set yourselves apart?

King: As we develop a product lineup overtime, I think investors will be able to see how we differentiate…. We have the bitcoin fund which is done at a lower price point and with different service providers. The other funds that we have rolled out are both first-to-market products that don’t compete with anything that Grayscale has.

Right now, we have single asset-based trusts. We have three products: Bitcoin, Algorand and Polkadot. In the future, you’ll see us launch index based products… so they’ll give broader exposure for investors. You’ll also see actively managed strategies that are not just passive beta products. They will be alpha products.

One of the differentiators around Osprey is that we are fully focused on digital assets only. We are committed long term to the space. This is not just an experimental product launch. We are building a world class investment firm and are excited about the growth prospects it has.

Chittum: How would you describe Osprey’s investment strategy?

King: At Osprey, I think, at a fundamental level, we fully believe in the power of blockchain-based technologies. Period. We’ve set ourselves up to both invest and help others invest in those technologies for the benefit of their long-term investment portfolios. 

We believe in diversification as a strategy. I believe that investors benefit from having their portfolio professionally managed, either by themselves or by more formal institutions…Our main purpose is to really help give investors access — from an investment perspective — to the potential returns in growth that we think is generational in terms of the magnitude of blockchain-based technologies. 

Chittum: What’s something that attracts those investors to your fund? What type of investors are you targeting? 

King: The products are built to an institutional caliber so we are focused on and [are] able to offer them to institutional clients. The majority of our assets have come from institutional clients. However, they’re also available to individual investors and we are committed to creating more pathways to access them. [This is] primarily by registering them under a ticker symbol to be traded whenever possible.

Chittum: What is something you wish more investors knew about Osprey?

King: I think they should understand the depths of the team’s backgrounds in both [exchange traded funds] and crypto. Not just myself but other members of our teams have decades of experience working with ETFs for large companies like Barclays, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and more.