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• “We were meeting with hundreds of individuals and providing them with financial advice. We noticed that a huge portion of them wanted to invest in digital assets,” shared Lucas Ooi, Co-founder & Chief Business Officer of 500-backed crypto fund manager Halogen Capital.
• “Many of them did not feel comfortable trading cryptocurrencies actively themselves or buying and storing them with an exchange. They were looking for a [more familiar] way to access cryptos through a local institution. So, we went into the market to find one. But it didn’t take us very long to realize that there were none.”
• Thus, the world’s first shariah-compliant Bitcoin unit trust fund in Malaysia, Halogen Shariah Bitcoin Fund (HSBF), was born. Halogen was launched at a rather interesting time for the crypto industry, and Co-founder & CEO Hann Liew explains, “The key issue last year was not so much about crypto itself, but classic governance failures such as the segregation of client assets.”
• Halogen plans to introduce a shariah-compliant Ethereum and an actively managed multi-coin unit trust fund in the near future, and the team is also exploring an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the price performance of digital assets such as Bitcoin.
• But why do we need a Bitcoin unit trust fund when we can today trade digital assets freely on the four licensed digital asset exchanges (DAXs) in Malaysia? What Halogen offers is for institutional and corporate investors who want a comprehensive governance structure for their digital assets, covering areas such as cybersecurity, accounting, auditing, and tax to fulfill their compliance obligation.
• According to Hann, their ultimate goal is to be the top digital asset management firm in the country and beyond. “We want to be the first port of call for any investor, whether individual, corporate or institutional, when they think of digital asset investing,” he shared.
• Read the full story on The Edge.