September 2022. The NFT cycle had peaked, the macro had turned, and most web3 funds were pivoting to "AI" or quietly closing. We launched anyway. Three years later the vehicle returned +73.31% and wound down at all-time highs. This is the post-mortem of a fund that did what it said it would do.
01 · The thesis
The timing looked terrible, which is usually when the timing is fine. Peers were rotating into AI or vanishing. We wrote a thesis that was deliberately narrow:
- On-chain. Self-custodian. No CEX counterparty risk, no custody deferred to "later."
- ETH-heavy. Not crypto beta — a specific conviction in Ethereum as the base layer.
- No leverage. No illiquid positions we couldn't exit. No memecoin bags masquerading as venture.
- Real structure. A Luxembourg SCSp AIF — wagmi web3 Fund I — so LPs got audited reporting and we got real governance.
Partners, signatures on every material decision — the kind of friction that looks annoying until you need it.
02 · What we built
A fund that actually held what it said it held. Every position on-chain, every wallet verifiable, NAV reconciled to the block. Exposure concentrated in ETH and quality L1/L2 infrastructure. Small sleeves for DeFi bluechips, select NFTs, metaverse land — sized small enough that being wrong didn't matter and being right barely moved the needle. Which was the point. The book was built around the ETH call, not decorated with it.
The best call in the book: overweighting ETH and refusing to rotate into BTC when the consensus trade was "BTC dominance up." That call caught most of the +60% Q2 upside on the right side of the cycle. Not because we're oracles. Because we had written down what the fund was for, and the consensus trade wasn't it.
03 · How it performed
Not a generational fund. But every LP got back more than they put in, audited and on-chain, through a cycle that killed most of our peers. That is the bar. Everything above it is style.
04 · Why we wound it down
Summer 2025. Prices at new highs. MiCA implementation about to change the compliance math for a small AIF like ours — authorized person requirements, transaction reporting, the usual small-fund-killer menu. Another operator might have grinded through the transition. We did the math.
For a $1.6M AIF, the incremental MiCA overhead would have eaten the next year's returns before it earned them. The rational move was the one we took: return capital at the top, close the book, and move on.
Most funds die because the managers can't admit the thing stopped working. A smaller number die because the managers can't admit it did work, and there is nothing left to prove.
We closed by choice, at the high. wagmi Fund I did what it was supposed to do. Sometimes the honest answer is "stop."
05 · What it funded
The fund named the holding company and it bankrolled the operating thesis.
Proceeds from Fund I went into the two operational projects that now anchor NGMI: Ristorante Roma (acquired 2024 — the first Italian restaurant in Luxembourg, est. 1950 — 5th owner in 75 years) and Blocx Urban Fitness (opened 2023 — Luxembourg's largest bouldering gym, with Los Monos hospitality inside). Both are long-horizon, operationally heavy, unsellable on a three-year clock. Exactly the kind of thing a crypto cycle cannot fund, which is why you need a crypto cycle to fund them.
WAGMI is a web3 meme — "we're all gonna make it." NGMI is the older, more honest version. The fund was WAGMI. The holding is NGMI. That's the joke, and it's also the playbook.
06 · What I'd do again, what I'd do differently
Again: the structure. A Luxembourg AIF with real LPs and six-partner governance forced discipline that a personal book never would have. The ETH overweight. The refusal to chase NFTs in size. Ending it on our terms instead of MiCA's.
Differently: I would have raised bigger. $1.6M at close is a respectable small fund, but the thesis and the discipline could have carried $10M without changing anything about how we operated. We were too conservative on the raise because we were too paranoid about the macro. The macro went our way anyway. If there's a lesson in it for the next operator to read this: size the vehicle for the thesis, not for the fear.
Alpha Molten One SCSp is that next vehicle — though this time NGMI is an investor, not the manager. The operating weight has shifted back to the holding's real work: Roma, Blocx, the agent business. The crypto thesis continues, but from the LP seat. The wagmi discipline is on the shelf now; the track record exists if the next structure ever needs it.