Ex-Citadel, Millennium, Tower Research guys join young crypto hedge fund manager
Nikita Fadeev isn't so young any more. Fadeev began running London-based crypto hedge fund Fasanara Digital aged 25 in 2021. He's now nearly four years older and is no longer a candidate for the Forbes 30 under 30 list. But he's still a person to be watched. And he is also hiring.
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Fasanara Digital, the circa $500m AUM crypto division of Fasanara Capital, which has $5.5bn in AUM, now employs 25 people. They include recent joiners with histories at big industry names.
For example, Conor White, who was head of technology for Citadel in Europe and Asia between 2005 and 2018, joined Fadeev's team last month as head of front office technology. Jerome Busca, a former portfolio manager at Millennium, joined in April. We understand that a mystery head of high frequency trading has also joined recently from Tower Research.
Fadeev says the intention is for Fasanara Digital to employ 30 people by the end of Q1 2026. The focus will be DeFi "with a few key hires in hunting out market neutral yield and building on-chain automation." This is because, "protocols have shown themselves to be robust in the face of CEX volatility."
Fadeev has a reputation for working long hours and trading every day of the week. Last time we spoke to him, aged 29 and employing 15 people, he'd stayed up all night before the US election and traded all weekend.
It's not clear whether this was repeated on October 10th, when crypto crashed, but Fadeev said Fasanara Digital's systems "performed well through the volatility" and that it was the fund's highest volume day to date. Events like that simply help flush excess leverage out of the system, he added. "We expect the medium- to long-term impact to be limited."
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