The Steaker team
Steaker, a Taiwanese crypto asset management platform, has raised US$1 million seed funding from individual investors.
A notable investor is Jeffrey Huang (Machi Big Brother), a Taiwanese-American music, entertainment and technology industry leader and founder of both MITH and 17LIVE.
Founded in 2019 by Wilson Huang (CEO), Steaker has grown its asset under management (AUM) to over US$50 million.
Huang remarked that investment opportunities presented by the blockchain and crypto space should not be exclusive to the elite.
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Therefore, Steaker distinguishes itself from conventional crypto management platforms by catering to the needs of younger and less knowledgeable investors.
“A majority of investors on our platform are retail, who account for 70 per cent of the total AUM,” Huang said.
Despite his young age, Huang is a veteran in the blockchain space. He was previously Vice-President of decentralised social media platform MITH.
Additionally, he participated in the development of Ethereum’s layer-2 solution, Plasma.
On Steaker, users can choose from five types of investment options with different risk profiles and return characteristics, backed by strategies from stablecoin lending, DeFi yield farming, to algorithm-driven arbitrage.
In the future, Huang hopes to add more decentralised features to the platform while maintaining its convenience for non-crypto users.
With the rapid growth of cryptocurrencies over the last decade, the need for crypto-asset managers is growing. The latest study of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance estimated the number of identity-verified crypto-asset users at about 101 million globally in Q3 2020, increasing fourfold over four years.
In spite of the pandemic disrupting traditional investment vehicles, the crypto space has been witnessing rapid growth. Driven by the decentralised finance (DeFi) boom, the total value of cryptocurrency hit US$12 billion in late October.
Also Read: A lowdown on why DeFi is good for the growth of cryptocurrency
Steaker is also partnering with other digital asset management companies, local crypto exchanges and DeFi projects such as Cream Finance and WageCan to expand the scope of their offerings and enhance their portfolio management capability.
Their newly announced partnership with MaiCoin, the largest one-stop asset management platform provider in Taiwan, aims to increase the functionality and interactivity of Steaker’s platform.
Earlier this year, Steaker was selected to join AppWorks Accelerator, the leading startup accelerator in Greater Southeast Asia (Taiwan and Southeast Asia).
“AI, Blockchain and DeFi are the major paradigm shifts happening right in front of our eyes, creating huge opportunities for startups. In Steaker, we see a team leveraging these game-changing platform shifts in a very promising fashion,” commented Jamie Lin, Chairman and Partner of AppWorks, who is also a mentor to Steaker.
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Image Credit: Steaker
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