Highlights From “The Crypto-Quest For Yield” — VegaX Digital Asset Education Series
This edition of the VegaX Holdings Digital Asset Education Series in Partnership with Chinaccelerator features Leslie Lamb, Head of Institutional Sales at Amber Group — your gateway to crypto finance.
Leslie provides insight on her early career, founding a company, accessing yield-enhancing opportunities in the crypto space, and her advice for new and experienced crypto investors.
You can revisit and replay the recording of the webinar series by clicking on the link below.
Watch Recording: VegaX Digital Asset Education Series: The Crypto-Quest For Yield
For a summary of the webinar discussion, keep reading!
As always, please reach out to us with questions, comments, and suggestions for topics/speakers for our Digital Asset Education series!
About Leslie Lamb, Head of Institutional Sales at Amber Group, a leading global crypto finance provider
Leslie is a former investment banker, founder of a global digital asset consulting firm called 21 Landmark Capital, and is now leading institutional sales division at Amber Group. Leslie is currently based in Hong Kong but she grew up in the U.S. She started in private banking in New York working with private clients and multi-generational families. She wrote the bank’s first piece on the state of crypto regulation in December 2017.
When further describing her work history, Leslie stated,
“When I moved to Hong Kong in 2018 I started 21 Landmark Capital. I joined the Amber team in 2019 when the company had just raised its Series A funding round and was looking to grow its offshore presence working with institutional investors. A key to growing the Amber platform has been the focus on product development and innovation. Alongside that growth we put an effort around content generation and education. I started the crypto inside podcast to reach the crypto-curious crowd and even the skeptics.”
How did you make the jump into digital assets?
“So my crypto journey started back in the summer of 2012 in Germany. I was doing research and Germany was called the bitcoin capital at that point in time. Bars and cafes in a popular district in Berlin started taking bitcoin as payment back then. In 2013 I went back to Germany to work on another research project and I was looking at alternative money systems and this time I had known about bitcoin and put it at the center of my research.
The question I wanted to ask was how viable is bitcoin as a payments method? I wanted to get the perspective of local merchants in Hamburg where I was at the time. The conclusion I made was that Germany was and still is very heavily cash-based, so there wasn’t a need to adopt bitcoin. However, this was my tipping-off point for venturing deeper into crypto. 2013 was a great year for bitcoin because it hit a bunch of milestones.”
Do you think it’s difficult to find or access yield-enhancing options now in the digital asset market? How have you seen things change and evolve into what we are seeing today?
“I think of yield in two different categories. The first is yield on crypto assets like bitcoin and the other category is dollars in crypto. On bitcoin dialing back to 2012, Bitconex which is a crypto exchange, a p2p margin lending platform for Bitcoin. They have a feature called margin funding which allows users to be a funding source for crypto assets by providing funding to other traders on the platform. As a margin lender you could earn interest.
Around 2018 things really got interesting. Genesis Trading, a Digital Currency Group subsidiary launched a bitcoin lending service as part of their institutional offering and around the same time many retail platforms like Celsius and BlockFi launched crypto lending services. Combined they expanded the yield opportunities across more crypto assets, so not just bitcoin.
Now, we’ve started to see rates come down a lot on some of these platforms in response to the supply/demand imbalance.
Then when you look at the dollars in crypto, it’s also very interesting. Traders who are tuning in right now might be familiar with buying bitcoin spot and selling bitcoin futures and capturing the premium paid on the futures contract. This trade has become more and more popular over time as crypto capital markets have grown, and it’s a way for traders to earn yield on their dollars.
For people who are not traders, what you have to focus on is the massive growth around crypto dollars, which means Tether(USDT) and USD Coin (USDC). When crypto markets took a nose dive last year, that’s when we saw the real use case for crypto dollars. I think the rise of stablecoins is part of the reason the market has ballooned to where it is today. It has really changed everything we know about crypto trading, borrowing and lending, as well as asset management.”
What do you see in the future of the crypto space in regards to yield?
“For most of the people tuning in right now, if you aren’t familiar with ways to get yield and capture yield in crypto, I would say just go with the easy route first. That means converting your USD bank dollars into USD stablecoins. As you get comfortable holding stablecoins, start exploring the crypto-lending markets.
To use a platform like Amber App, retail investors can get access to trading and investing tools that were built out already for the institutional market. Our treasury management program, Amber Earn, is our most popular offering. This product is popular because as soon as you deposit in Amber Earn you can start earning up to 4% APY interest.
We also have a fixed term savings product that allows you to customize your investment subscription period based on your liquidity preference, and Amber pays you a fixed yield of up to 11% annualized on these fixed-term deposits. You can also use these interest bearing deposits as collateral for margin trading.
We also have a product for more advanced traders called Yield Boost, which is a yield-enhancement product. We want to help traders get rid of the difficulties with trading crypto derivatives. With Yield Boost you can monetize your view on the market to earn higher yields. Therefore, someone who wants steady income should use Yield Boost.”
In your opinion, what is the most exciting aspect of crypto right now?
“Crypto to me is about changing behaviors. Changing the way we manage money. The fact that more people are coming to the realization that something about the financial system needs to change, in the form of the crypto finance end goal or the NFT angle, is by far the most exciting thing to me on a high level.”
What’s your final word of advice for anyone who is trying to learn more about digital assets?
“For active crypto traders and investors, continue to evangelize your non-crypto friends because education is a long path and when you talk about things enough times, the crypto skeptics will turn crypto-curious and hopefully become crypto enthusiasts.
For those just entering the space, now is the time to consume content; research reviews, webinars, blog articles, whatever. There’s no shortage of information out there about crypto. Start to develop an understanding of the crypto space, and from there you will be able to figure out what works well for you. From there you can join the space and help the crypto space grow.”
Stay tuned for the NEXT edition of our Digital Asset Education Series. Learn more about Digital Assets and enhancing returns by joining our newsletter: https://vegaxholdings.com/
As always, please reach out to us with questions, comments, and suggestions for topics/speakers for our Digital Asset Education series! info@vegaxholdings.com
Amber Group: https://www.ambergroup.io/
Amber Group is a crypto financial services firm that offers services that range from market making to asset management and product offerings. The company is headquartered in Hong Kong with additional offices in cities across the globe. The company provides trading and asset management services to more than 500 institutional clients along with products like the Amber app which is also available to retail investors.
VegaX Holdings: https://vegaxholdings.com/
VegaX Holdings is the “BlackRock” of the Crypto Asset Industry. We provide investors globally with one-stop access to sophisticated and secure crypto asset management. The asset management industry is the largest in the world representing more than $80 trillion dollars in investments through investment products like ETFs, mutual funds, and indices that outperform investments in individual stocks. VegaX is the first to create similar investment products for Crypto providing investors outperformance versus buying individual cryptocurrencies. On average, investors buying VegaX products make 30% more profit versus just holding Bitcoin.
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