#164 An Ex-JPMorgan PM Breaks Down Crypto’s Biggest Regulatory Gray Area | Bo Zhang, Unsquared

Background: Bo Zhang, partner at unsquared capital. previously portfolio manager at JPM in their CIO team. He was COO of a 1.5B BTC asset manager / issuer, and ran US and Europe for Canton Foundation.

Description: Mike Schroeder and Skyler Steinke host Bo Zhang, partner at Unsquared Capital, who shares how he moved from traditional finance (including roles at JPMorgan and as COO of a multi-billion-dollar manager) into crypto after discovering Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2014. Bo recounts leaving Wall Street to build an agent-based simulation modeling firm, joining FunctionXBTC as COO/head of investments, running US and Europe for the Cantillon Foundation to bridge institutions into blockchain, and then founding Unsquared.

He explains Unsquared’s institutional SMA-focused, factor-based approach to constructing delta/beta-neutral portfolios, emphasizing hypothesis-driven research, avoiding overfitting and normal-distribution risk heuristics, and using alternative distributions for tail risk. The group discusses crypto tail risks centered on centralized exchanges and regulation, perp markets and funding rates, best-execution tactics including maker bias and trade coordination layers, why SMAs appeal for transparency and custody, stablecoin regulation as a key trend, and Bo’s personal interest in Hype and Zcash.