- Abdul Gadit is the co-founder of Zignaly, a crypto copy trading platform that oversees $120 million.
- The banker-turned-crypto founder recounts why he left his own startup to bet it all on Zignaly.
- He also shares his technical analysis of bitcoin’s price, and 4 altcoins he’s “betting strongly on.”
By the time the raging bitcoin (BTC)
bull market
in 2017 rolled around, Abdul Gadit was already trading cryptocurrencies full-time after quitting his job at Standard Chartered Bank.
In the midst of the frenzy over initial coin offerings, the former banker, who said he scooped up bitcoin for under $500 in 2015, started to reinvest some of his realized profits into the private token sales of emerging projects.
Gadit recalled getting into ethereum (ETH) at around $14 at the start of the year only to see it shoot above $1,000 in January 2018. Hoping to capitalize on the momentum, he launched his own crypto-focused fund management startup.
“I had this thing of analyzing projects, reading their white papers, and talking to the founders who were a lot more accessible than they are today,” he said in an interview. “Obviously, not everything worked out, but a lot of these projects did really well.”
As Gadit dived deeper into the business, he noticed that the crypto market was still dominated by retail traders rather than hedge funds or professional investors.
“I realized that instead of doing the large tickets, this has to go towards the more commercialized and more retail audience,” he said.
Shortly after, he met David Rodriguez and Bartolome R. Bordallo, who were just beginning to build the crypto copy trading platform Zignaly as a way to help retail investors to learn how to execute more advanced trading strategies from successful traders.
“So I closed my fund management firm,” Gadit said. “I took out all the budgeted funds from there and I said ‘listen, guys, let’s put it here, let’s do it together.'”
Mimicking the trading strategies of advanced traders
Three years later, Zignaly has grown into a copy trading platform with 4 billion in trading volume and 430,000 users. It has also attracted $120 million in assets that are managed by almost 370 traders and fund managers, Gadit said.
The platform’s top 20 traders, who have been active for at least one year, have averaged more than 270% in yearly profit, according to the firm, which tracks the traders’ returns via connected exchange data. Traders’ funds are still secured at the exchange level.
For example, the most successful trader on the site appears to have achieved a total return of 1,051.93% since May 2021 and attracted 275 copiers.
While the traders on the platform are pseudonymous, Gadit said they all have to go through a rigorous verification process that includes a “know your customer” procedure and a one-month screening period.
“If things go against the guidelines, we have a right to liquidate service and actually distribute the funds back to the users,” he said. “We want to make sure that user interests are aligned.”
Zignaly, which recently raised $50 million from the $3.4 billion alternative investment group Global Emerging Markets, has also been expanding beyond copy trading.
Besides mimicking the trading strategies of advanced traders, beginner users can co-invest alongside successful investors as part of a profit-sharing program. In addition, users can also participate in a staking program where they can stake the platform’s native ZIG token to earn passive income. To be sure, the token has plunged by 15.9% in the past month, according to CoinGecko data.
Bitcoin could reach another all-time high, 4 token picks
After a whirlwind quarter during which bitcoin tumbled to as low as $32,000, the largest cryptocurrency ended the first three months of 2022 trading above $44,000. Bitcoin was changing hands at nearly $46,000 as of Tuesday afternoon, per CoinGecko pricing.
That’s a good sign, according to Gadit, who uses both technical and fundamental analyses to inform his outlook on the prices of major cryptocurrencies.
Fundamentally, a strong quarterly finish amid a myriad of macro headwinds accentuates the resilience of the asset, which helps the continued adoption of cryptocurrencies by institutional investors and sovereign nations.
Just this week, the UK government announced plans to become a “global crypto asset technology hub” while asking the country’s Royal Mint to create a non-fungible token to be issued this summer.
Technically, if bitcoin is able to sustain the trading range between $42,000 and $44,000, then there is a “strong likelihood” for the digital currency to reach another all-time high in the next three to six months, in his view.
Gadit also looks at the bitcoin dominance index and altcoin market cap. While there haven’t been too many obvious signs of strength in the recent altcoin rally, he believes that the consolidation in bitcoin can lead to a wider, albeit more volatile, upward move in those major large-cap tokens such as ethereum.
For his personal portfolio, he is “betting strongly on” four altcoins, among others. They include exchange tokens BNB (BNB) and FTX token (FTT) as well as layer-one blockchains solana (SOL) and syscoin (SYS).
He especially likes BNB and FTT because they are the native tokens of two of the largest crypto exchanges — Binance and FTX.
“They are revenue-generating businesses,” Gadit said. “People don’t value the fact enough that revenue-generating businesses can survive bear markets and thrive in bull markets.”
The SOL token has surged 446.5% in the past year even after recent sharp declines. The SYS token, which was trading at $0.672447 as of Tuesday afternoon, rose 89.5% in the last year, according to CoinGecko data.