Joe Naggar, CEO & CIO of Feynman Point Asset Management
FPAM
Joe Naggar, a former partner at Steven Tananbaum’s GoldenTree Asset Management, is launching an independent hedge fund with $300 million under management, marking the formal spin-out of his team from crypto-focused investment firm Republic.
Naggar spent 16 years at GoldenTree, helping oversee its $61 billion in credit assets. A longtime crypto enthusiast, he started mining bitcoin in 2013 and made early investments in projects like Stacks and Algorand as well as Coinbase. In 2022, he began assembling a dedicated digital assets team inside GoldenTree, betting that macro-informed approach and institutional-grade risk management could win in crypto markets.
But the wave of collapses that followed—Celsius, Voyager Digital, FTX—triggered a regulatory crackdown that reshaped the landscape, so GoldenTree sold the fledgling crypto fund to Republic, a New York-based investment firm, less than two years later.
Now, Naggar and his team, previously operating as Republic Digital, are striking out independently as Feynman Point Asset Management, an investment firm focused on digital asset markets and frontier technologies.
“We’re going to keep doing exactly what we did before—same focus on process, performance, institutional quality, but do even more,” he says. “The Feynman Point Special Opportunities Fund we’ve created to bring some of our best investment ideas to our LPs to co-participate is one example of that.”
Even through transitions, the fund has done well. Backers—including L1D, a $600 million Swiss fund, and New York-based Blockchain Investment Group—have earned an annualized net return of over 42% since the fund’s inception in 2022, according to Feynman. Among its winning trades: buying the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) at a 40% discount to its underlying assets, early exposure to breakout decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, and an equity investment in Ripple, developer of the XRP cryptocurrency.
GBTC has since become an ETF and now trades at net asset value. Hyperliquid’s HYPE token (Naggar’s team “made a large investment” at the time of its launch in November 2024) is now trading around $40 with a market capitalization above $10 billion. Meanwhile, Ripple’s stock is up 162% since January and is now valued at $22.1 billion in private markets, according to data from Forge—thanks in large part to the resolution of its five-year lawsuit with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Naggar is also a big investor in the growing digital asset treasury (DAT) trend of public companies hoarding up cryptocurrencies à la Saylor’s Strategy. “A lot of the positions we did were 30-75 basis points, 1% on the bigger side, but we probably invested in 15 or 17 different DATs,” he says.
Those include Tom Lee’s BitMine Immersion Technologies, Joe Lubin’s SharpLink Gaming, Cantor Fitzgerald-backed Twenty One Capital and Kyle Samani’s Forward Industries.
Among the standouts, Naggar also highlights Sonnet BioTherapeutics (to become Hyperliquid Strategies upon merger with Rorschach I LLC, expected later this year) that has recently announced a $888 million raise for Hyperliquid’s HYPE tokens. “It’s very difficult to have exposure to Hyperliquid as a U.S. investor, but this one brings access,” he explains. “Some DATs are kind of money grabs and maybe don’t deserve the attention, but there are others that add some real value, either in the ecosystem or for investors, by doing smart stuff.”
