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  • How Anjan Vinod Grew ParaFi Capital to $669m in 5 years

How Anjan Vinod Grew ParaFi Capital to $669m in 5 years

and a look at biggest winners & recent buys

Author

Kierin M
February 17, 2024

Anjan Vinod is a skilled investor who finds highly profitable investment opportunities in the crypto market.

He and his 20-person team have grown ParaFi Capital from $84m to $669m in 5 years.

This is what we will be covering:

Table of Contents

The great thing is that these portfolio strategies work well for any portfolio size.

From shrimp to whale.

Anyone can benefit from these insights!

Current ParaFi Portfolio

ParaFi holds a total of 48 projects in their portfolio.

Here’s the complete list:

But what’s probably most interesting for you are their top gainers in the last 30 days. 

So, let’s take a quick look at them:

  • Immutable X ($3.09, 30D: +52.8%, mcap: $2.14B, private ROI: 30.9x)

  • Badger DAO ($4.48, 30D: +30.3%, mcap: $89.4M, private ROI: Not known)

  • Gelato ($0.883, 30D: +25.2%, mcap: $160M, private ROI: 2.97x)

  • PoolTogether ($0.3628, 30D: +22.0%, mcap: $3.63M, private ROI: 0.259x)

  • Coin98 ($0.3, 30D: +18.4%, mcap: $211M, private ROI: 4.0x)

  • The Graph ($0.1896, 30D: +16.1%, mcap: $1.55B, private ROI: 6.32x)

  • LeverFi ($0.001673, 30D: +15.3%, mcap: $54.2M, private ROI: 7.31x)

Most of the top gainers don’t have an insane private ROI multiple, which is a good sign. LeverFi, an on-chain leverage trading platform, only has a cap of $54m and a private ROI 7x.

Top overall biggest winners

ParaFi, founded in 2018, invested in some of the most noteworthy DeFi projects in the space.

These are ParaFis investments that had the highest ROI:

  • Aave (82.9x): The first lending and borrowing platform in the DeFi space.

  • Uniswap (96.2x): The first decentralized token-swapping platform in DeFi.

  • The Graph GRT (63x): Indexing protocol for querying networks like Ethereum and IPFS. Anyone can build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, making data easily accessible.

Here are a few things I noticed when analyzing their wins:

  • Strong team: ParaFi understands how to identify a strong and resilient team that can build. (most of these projects were built in the 2018 bear market)

  • Unique Technology: All the winners have unique tech stacks and bring innovation to the space. They are not forks of existing projects.

  • No external factors: They all solve important problems in space and don’t rely on regulations or governments to succeed.

Biggest overall losers

While top winners are impressive, looking at trades that did not go so well is equally important.

This also allows you to understand the fund’s strategies better and if that is something you want to implement for yourself.

These are ParaFis investments that performed the worst:

  • Futureswap (private date: 2021-10-21, raise: $13M, private ROI: 0.0133x): Decentralized leverage trading on Ethereum. Token performance is -99%, and the chart looks completely dead with $40k liquidity. It also looks like the Twitter account hasn’t been active for over a year.

  • Jet Protocol (private date: 2021-11-08, raise: $11.6M, private ROI: 0.03x): Decentralized lending and borrowing built on the Solana blockchain. This is also down -99.9%, and it currently has a cap of $182k. The tokenomics look atrocious. This was a big issue with many of the Solana tokens in 2021.

  • MetaSoccer (private date: 2021-11-23, raise: $1.8M, private ROI: 0.0669x): A metaverse football club game where you can build your club. It’s built on top of the polygon chain. It’s gone pretty much downhill since the 2021 rally. Currently has a mcap of $200k

  • Burrow (private date: 2022-03-30, raise: $5M, private ROI: 0.0783x): A lending and borrowing dapp built on the near ecosystem. The app doesn’t work, and parts of the website aren’t working. Mcap is at $2.3m.

  • IONX Charged Particles (private date: 2021-05-05, raise: $1.75M, private ROI: 0.093x): Mint digital assets like interest-bearing DeFi NFts or whole portfolios into an NFT. Current mcap is $1.4m. It looks like the team is still building, and they got a grant to deploy on Mantle.

There are a few things that their worst-performing tokens have in common. First of all, a lot of the private raises were at the peak of the 2021 bullrun, meaning the projects often had a way too high valuation.

Many projects have very bad tokenomics (i.e., Futureswap and Jet Protocol), which caused the price to drop significantly. The only project from the list that I think has a chance of making a comeback is IONX.

This is a higher-risk play, but you would get a better deal than investment funds at the current price.

Recent ParaFi Investments Breakdown

Here are the recent raises ParaFi participated in:

  • Cube Exchange ($12M): A hybrid trading platform that combines tradfi with blockchain technology. They aim to provide a blazingly fast trading environment. There is no token yet.

  • Bitfinity Network ($5.5m): A fast Bitcoin L2 EVM. They are also building a BTC to Bitfinity bridge with some new tech. You can read more about it in the project spotlight below. There is no token yet.

  • Wormhole ($225m): Wormhole is an open source blockchain development platform connecting the decentralized web. It enables secure cross-chain transfers of tokens and data.

  • Kinto ($5m): They are building a safe, decentralized, and KYCed L2 for financial institutions. It's not super interesting for retail.

  • Superstate ($4m): Superstate is an asset management fund modernizing the investing infrastructure of funds with blockchain tech. This is probably only interesting for funds and not for retail.

🧰 Actionable: When investing as a retail investor, looking at what VCs are investing in can be helpful, as they are often early to market trends and have a long-term investing horizon. Analyze what VCs hold in their portfolio and see if their style aligns with yours.

Project Spotlight: Bitfinity Network

Here’s one of the most recent project raises ParaFi participated in, and I thought I’d do a quick rundown of what they do.

Bitfinity is a next-generation EVM L2 solution designed to address the low transactions per second output commonly associated with Bitcoin. 

The team says they can process over 1000 TPS, making this an exceptionally fast EVM.

I’m gonna need to see that for myself before I believe it.

The platform also uses a new cryptography technology called chain-key to ensure a decentralized method of bridging their EVM and the Bitcoin network.

All in all, it looks like an interesting project that is tapping into the BRCfi narrative.

This is probably also one of the reasons ParaFi decided to invest. They understand that there will be more and more demand for BRCfi services and that the only way to fulfill that demand is with L2 tech.

In the same way that Arbitrum and Optimism exist for Ethereum, there will be several L2 ecosystems using Bitcoin as a security layer.

🧰 Actionable: Join the Bitfinity discord and check regularly when the testnet goes live and where and when a token sale might happen. When the testnet goes live, use it. By doing this, you might be eligible for an airdrop in the future.

ParaFi Soundbites You Might Enjoy

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