Fintech
A crypto hedge fund hired by Citadel Securities wants to double its size
Kbit, a cryptocurrency hedge fund AND high frequency market maker, he might sell himself short a bit when he describes himself as a “growing” team.. After hiring some senior alumni from established TradFi firms, it appears the fund wants to more than double its size.
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Kbit says it has “~12 employees”… and 17 open job listings. He’s hiring quantity, algorithmic trading, DevOps and business operations engineers in the US, London, Hong Kong and Singapore. These are all full-time on-site positions, despite social media data suggesting the company does not yet have any employees even in Hong Kong or London.
Job adverts suggest the company is working surprisingly light. Kbit has “virtually no user interfaceall development is back-end related to our automated trading system.” It describes its culture as “casual, scientific and engineering-focused” with “zero bureaucracy”.
The Kbit team is full of hedge fund, HFT and cryptocurrency veterans. Its founder and CEO is Ed Tolson, former director of commercial technology at Citadel. CTO/COO Marc Zeitouni spent three years at HFT Tower Research Capital as product manager for global trading systems and was also CTO of the cryptocurrency investment bank Digital Galaxy.
Many people have used cryptocurrencies in the past avoid garden leave periods, and Tolson is no exception, he’s just sticking around. Previously he said about a podcasts who started Kbit as a “side project” while on leave at the Garden, in 2017. When the price of bitcoin exploded, Kbit “exploded into a real business.” Last January it announced that it had over $100 million in assets under management.
Now, in 2024, Tolson is bringing in some big names. Thomas Johnson, former senior quantitative developer at Citadel Titles, who joined last month as principal research engineer. In February, Kbit also hired Sean Slotterback, a former prime minister and head of statistical arbitrage at Tower Research Capital.
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