At the RockawayX Summit in London, Managing Partner and CEO Viktor Fischer reflected on three market cycles, shared lessons from launching funds through crises, and outlined how RockawayX is positioning itself at the center of the onchain financial system.
Main Takeaways
- RockawayX has grown from a $6.5M first fund to managing $2.7B in assets across venture, credit, and infrastructure.
- Every RockawayX fund launch coincided with a major market crash (COVID, Luna, and FTX), yet each produced strong returns and long-term outperformance.
- The firm’s infrastructure strategy now includes optical fiber networks, validator operations, and onchain market making.
- RockawayX projects a $20T crypto market by 2030, driven by pro-crypto regulation, global liquidity expansion, and yield-based use cases.
- Yield, stablecoins, and tokenized financial primitives (like credit and reinsurance) will define the next phase of growth.
- Launching a liquid hedge fund is the next main team expansion effort.
A Track Record Forged In Crises
When Viktor Fischer, Managing Partner and CEO of RockawayX, took the stage at the RockawayX Summit in London, he opened with a story that has defined our firm’s evolution: every fund launch we’ve executed has coincided with a market meltdown.
“Every launch of our fund was very badly timed,” Fischer laughed.
He walked the audience through three examples:
- Fund I (2020) launched weeks before COVID and opened with just $6.5 million in commitments. One year later, it had closed at $123 million.
- Credit Fund (2022) launched one month before the collapse of Luna and UST, but fortunately escaped $6 million in losses by pulling funds early.
- VC Fund II (2022) went live in November, days before FTX imploded, yet went on to close at $125 million two years later.
Three Divisions, One Mission
After recounting the firm’s beginnings, Fischer shifted to where RockawayX stands today. What started as a $6.5 million AUM fund has evolved into a multi-division organization managing $2.7 billion in assets.
“We have three divisions,” Fischer explained. “Investments, Liquidity, and Engineering.”
The Investments division manages RockawayX’s venture capital strategy, backing early-stage crypto startups and liquid tokens.
The Liquidity division operates the our credit fund, an institutional vehicle managing over $110 million. It provides loans and liquidity to protocols while running market-neutral strategies that target stable, consistent returns. The division also manages onchain solvers that earn revenue by supporting the execution of cross-chain transfers.
Finally, the Engineering division oversees $1.4 billion in staked assets across RockawayX’s validator infrastructure and is now pushing the frontier further. In partnership with DoubleZero, the team is building optical fiber connectivity that delivers the same private-network speeds used by technology giants like Google and Meta, but optimized for blockchain networks.
Together, these divisions represent a unified mission: to operate across every layer of the onchain economy from hardware and capital to protocols and liquidity.
The Case for Infrastructure
Fischer described the firm’s growing focus on infrastructure as a natural progression of where blockchain is headed. As networks scale and global trading intensifies, latency is the new bottleneck.
“The internet is too slow for what blockchains are becoming,” he said. “They’re turning into high-frequency operating systems for instant finance.”
To solve that, RockawayX is building optical cable connectivity with DoubleZero to establish a private, high-speed fiber network optimized for blockchain traffic. This investment brings the precision of high-frequency trading into the world of crypto, expanding it from a regional race (limited geographically between close endpoints like Chicago to New York) into a global, real-time system that spans continents.
“The whole blockchain world is becoming like high-frequency trading,” Fischer said. “But instead of Chicago and New York, it’s now Frankfurt and Tokyo, London and Singapore.”
Lessons from Three Market Cycles
Fischer then reflected on the perspective that comes from surviving three full market cycles. Through every bull run and crash, timing has mattered far less than participation.
“It doesn’t really matter when you allocate capital,” he said. “Even if you invested during the bull market of 2021, you still made money in crypto. It’s volatile, but it always moves upward.”
He explained that most of crypto’s upward movement happens in short bursts during a few decisive months each year. Missing those windows often means missing the majority of returns.
In 2024, the two breakout periods were March and November, when trading activity and token prices surged across the market. In 2025, the pattern repeated, with January marking the primary upswing around the time of Trump’s memecoin launch.
“If you weren’t allocated during those months,” Fischer said, “you pretty much didn’t make money.”
Why The Next Cycle Will Be Bigger
Stepping back, Fischer zoomed out to the bigger picture, reminding listeners of how far the market has come. In 2020, the total crypto market capitalization was around $200 billion. Today, it stands near $4 trillion: a 20x increase in five years.
“Yes, it’s volatile,” Fischer said. “But it’s always moving upward.”
RockawayX projects the total market will reach $20 trillion by 2030, representing a 5x increase and roughly a 40%t annualized return for allocators.
That growth, he argued, will be driven by three trends:
Trading
Trading remains crypto’s foundational use case. Centralized exchanges now process about $51 billion in daily spot volume, roughly one-quarter the size of Nasdaq’s. But derivatives dominate the landscape: perpetual contracts reach $300 billion per day, already exceeding Nasdaq’s total trading activity.
What’s more, decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes have surged 200% year over year, led by Solana, which reached $125 billion in monthly trading volume in September, surpassing Ethereum.
“Solana is the key blockchain we’re focusing on,” Fischer said. “It has the throughput and developer activity to support real financial markets.”
Stablecoins
The second pillar is stablecoins, now a $300 billion market that continues to expand in both diversity and utility. Beyond Tether and Circle, Fischer highlighted a new wave of yield-generating stablecoins like Ethena, which distribute returns derived from funding rates.
Yield
As stablecoin supply grows, so does the demand for yield-bearing instruments. That demand is being met by tokenized financial primitives such as credit, reinsurance, and onchain treasuries.
“Most stablecoins will mean more demand for yield,” he said. “That’s where we’re investing.”
The Onchain Citadel: Infrastructure, Liquidity, and Capital
Building on those market drivers, Fischer introduced the concept that encapsulates RockawayX’s mission: building the Onchain Citadel.
“If more and more financial services are moving on-chain, we want to be the company that runs those transactions,” he said.
Through our triple-division approach, we can participate in every stage of onchain capital flow from validating transactions to deploying and scaling them as structured products.
A key part of this system is our onchain solvers operation, which Fischer described as a high-frequency layer connecting blockchains in real time. Through these solvers, our firm handles roughly 75% of cross-chain transactions between Ethereum and Solana via bridges such as Mayan and Wormhole.
“When a user wants to move one thousand dollars from Ethereum to Solana, there’s a 75% chance that the transaction goes through our algorithms,” Fischer explained.
These solvers participate in auction-based systems, competing to execute transfers within 1.6 seconds. Thanks to our low-latency fiber infrastructure, we can wait until the final 350 milliseconds of Solana’s 400-millisecond block window to overbid competitors by a fraction of a cent.
“It’s really like high-frequency trading,” Fischer said. “A combination of super-performing infrastructure and market-making algorithms on top. That’s where the whole space is going.”
On the liquidity side, our credit fund continues to perform as a stable anchor within that ecosystem. Launched in 2022, the fund has returned 11% year-to-date, or roughly 14% annualized, with very low volatility (2.8% annualized), a Sharpe ratio of 8.8, and low correlations (0.5 to BTC, 0.12 to the S&P 500).
“It’s a great product as a parking spot for money,” Fischer said. “Monthly liquidity, 15% per year, low volatility. Where else do I get that?”
The credit fund is currently our only open vehicle, offering investors a liquid, market-neutral entry point into the onchain economy.
Fischer illustrated how this integrated model works in practice:
- Hyperliquid: $7 million loan to help expand derivatives trading capacity.
- OnRe: $12 million allocated to accelerate growth in tokenized reinsurance.
- Pareto Credit: $15 million to bootstrap institutional lending infrastructure.
- Exponent: $1 million seed loan that helped the protocol grow to $100 million in total value locked.
“There is no other VC doing both,” Fischer said. “We run the infrastructure and we provide liquidity. We are the on-chain version of Citadel.”
Next Up: Launching A Hedge Fund
To close, Fischer turned to our newest initiative: a hedge fund built from a proven internal strategy.
In May 2024, the team allocated $42 million from VC Fund II into a dedicated liquid strategies portfolio, focused on actively traded tokens with strong fundamentals. One year later, that position had grown to $93 million in NAV, a 120% increase, outperforming Bitcoin’s gains over the same period.
“That’s why we’re launching a new hedge fund,” Fischer said. “It’s a copy of what we’ve already been running successfully inside the firm.”
The new fund will focus on liquid opportunities that align with RockawayX’s long-term thesis:
- Revenue-generating tokens backed by real cash flow.
- Regulatory-aligned assets expected to benefit from future fee-switch mechanisms.
- Yield-bearing stablecoins that merge fixed income with onchain transparency.
- New onchain primitives such as tokenized credit, reinsurance, and lending protocols.
- Select undervalued equities in digital asset infrastructure, including emerging “DATs” (Digital Asset Trusts).
