- Sasha Fleyshman is a special situations analyst and junior portfolio manager at crypto firm Arca.
- He graduated from college in 2019 but has been trading and investing in crypto since late 2016.
- Fleyshman shares four digital asset tokens he’s bullish on, including one that’s almost distressed.
Getting a job in crypto these days is not for the faint of heart as the $2 trillion industry has attracted every type of talent from Wall Street veterans to tech entrepreneurs.
This makes the speedy advancement of Sasha Fleyshman, an analyst at crypto assest manager Arca who graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2019, all the more impressive.
But it was not exactly the career he expected. One day in November 2016, the pre-med major got a text from his uncle asking him to check out the Coinbase app.
Bitcoin, which was trading at around $300 at the time, immediately appealed to the libertarian in Fleyshman.
“I didn’t know where the resources were, so I was watching YouTube videos, I was Googling, and I was on Reddit. I was everywhere,” he recalled in an interview. “After three weeks, I put a fair amount of my money into it.”
Fleyshman had never interacted with the stock market before, but once he put whatever money he had as a college student into crypto, he had to learn what he was doing.
“I got in at a rather opportune time,” he said. “As the market started getting more bullish in 2017, I just started trading personally and I grew a bit of a track record. I also read white papers during the ICO craze and wrote some reports and blog posts.”
Fleyshman’s online presence caught Arca’s attention. He started as an intern at the crypto asset manager in 2018 and was brought on full-time in 2019.
“I was getting ready to start studying the MCATs and I just took a complete 180 and came here instead,” he said. “I have no regrets.”
‘One day here is about 5 days in a traditional market’
Having got into crypto right before the 2017
bull market
, Fleyshman has noticed that many new investors in the space have not quite come to terms with “just how fast a cycle in the space is.”
“There are a lot of differences to having a market be tradable 24/7/365 as opposed to the market being open and closed,” he said. “If you do the math, I think it’s 4.8 times as fast, so you can say that this market is about five times as fast. So one day here is about five days in a traditional market.”
This characteristic of the crypto market makes it prone to rapid moves and extraordinary volatility, which is something investors should bear in mind, according to Fleyshman.
4 digital asset tokens to bet on
Arca is known for investing in digital asset tokens beyond just bitcoin and ethereum. The crypto asset manager runs a digital assets fund and recently launched a digital yield fund.
Fleyshman shares four digital asset tokens that the team is bullish on.
One of them is the governance token of the red-hot blockchain game Axie Infinity (AXS), which has surged 224.6% in the past month.
As the first ethereum-based NFT game to hit over $1 billion in sales according to data from CryptoSlam, Axie Infinity counts over 1 million daily active users.
The governance token, which has a claim on Axie Infinity‘s treasury, allows holders to help determine the future direction of the game.
“The better the game does, the more volume that the game generates, the more revenues that they take in that go to the Treasury,” he said, “the better the actual governance token got because it now has a claim on those revenues that go to the Treasury.”
SushiSwap (SUSHI), which jumped 96.2% in the past month, is believed to be the “most undervalued token in digital assets” and could see its market cap triple from the current $2 billion valuation, Arca’s chief investment officer Jeff Dorman told Insider in a May Interview.
Nexus Mutual (NXM), a decentralized insurance platform that offers coverage for smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain, is “one of those positions that the traditional market would salivate over if they understood what’s going on,” Fleyshman said.
Compared to traditional insurance mutuals, Nexus Mutual is almost a distressed asset where “it is instantly worth 15% to 20% more than what you pay for it,” he said. The token has gone up 70.6% in the past 30 days.
Chiliz (CHZ), which has surged 56.5% over the past month, is another token on his radar.
The blockchain firm has been in the headlines recently as PSG tokens, which are created with its affiliate sports token platform Socios, are included in soccer superstar Lionel Messi’s financial package with the French soccer club Paris Saint-Germain.