Who is the new Ethereum whale Abraxas Capital?
Recently, Bitcoin and Ethereum have been driving the cryptocurrency market, leading to a significant rebound, with market liquidity clearly increasing and whale capital moving frequently.
Among them, London-based asset management company Abraxas Capital, due to its high-frequency on-chain operations and heavy positioning in Ethereum DeFi strategies, has become a focus during this round of rebound.
Accumulated over 270,000 ETH in a single week, heavily positioned in the Ethereum LST ecosystem
Recently, Abraxas Capital has been very active on-chain.
Overview of asset holdings of one public address of Abraxas Capital
According to Arkham data, as of May 20, the total value of cryptocurrency assets held by two related public addresses of Abraxas Capital has exceeded $1.15 billion, with a cumulative profit of about $280 million.
From the asset structure perspective, in addition to Bitcoin worth over $190 million, Abraxas Capital's portfolio is highly concentrated in Ethereum liquidity staking tokens (LST), which are used for staking or as collateral in various DeFi protocols.
Its main holdings include AwETH, wstETH, awstETH, and weETH, among which AwETH and wstETH combined hold more than $700 million, accounting for an absolute majority of its overall assets. These types of assets enjoy both on-chain staking yields and secondary market liquidity, reflecting Abraxas Capital's pursuit of a balanced strategy between stable returns and flexible reallocation.
From the perspective of asset growth pace, since mid-February 2025, the institution's asset scale has significantly accelerated, and recently broke through the $1 billion mark. Just in the past week (from May 13 to 20), its net assets increased by more than $130 million, mainly driven by a significant increase in AwSTETH (Aave v3 wstETH) positions, with an increase of over $120 million.
In terms of fund flows, over the past 7 days, Abraxas Capital has withdrawn nearly 270,000 ETH from centralized exchanges (CEX), completing about 6 buy transactions on average per day, with a cumulative value exceeding $690 million. Based on its average purchase price of $2,573.8, compared to the current ETH market price of about $2,500, this portion of the position is currently in a temporary unrealized loss state of about $11 million.
It is noteworthy that Abraxas Capital has significantly reduced its Bitcoin holdings within a month. On-chain data shows that in recent weeks, the institution has transferred a total of 2,000 BTC to exchanges, valued at over $190 million. However, it has recently started to accumulate again, withdrawing around $85 million worth of Bitcoin from exchanges.
According to Arkham data, the ETH funds of Abraxas Capital are mainly flowing into Ethereum DeFi protocols. In the past 7 days, Abraxas Capital has transferred over 174,000 ETH to mainstream DeFi protocols such as Aave, Ether.fi, and Compound, with an estimated total value of about $440 million at current prices. In particular, Aave is the primary use case for Abraxas Capital's ETH holdings, currently holding positions worth over $480 million on AAVE V3.
From this perspective, Abraxas Capital is becoming one of the more active and heavily invested institutional players in the Ethereum ecosystem, and is strengthening the liquidity and yield reuse of assets through deep participation in the DeFi market.
Asset scale exceeds $3 billion, once a major client of Tether
Abraxas Capital Management is an asset management company headquartered in London, regulated by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), aiming to build a top-tier asset management institution. The company was co-founded by Fabio Frontini and Luca Celati in 2002, both of whom previously held senior positions at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DRKW) in London.
Abraxas Capital initially focused on traditional finance, and on-chain data shows that the company began laying out Bitcoin assets as early as late 2014. In 2017, Abraxas Capital announced a shift in its business focus to digital assets.
Heka Funds is the core investment platform focusing on digital assets under Abraxas Capital, headquartered in Malta, and regulated by the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA), with assets exceeding $3 billion.
As a multi-fund investment company, Heka currently manages three main funds: Elysium Global Arbitrage Fund, launched in 2017, is the first officially licensed digital asset fund in the EU, with a return rate of 214.95% since its establishment.
As of the end of 2024, its asset management scale has exceeded €1.2 billion; the Alpha Bitcoin Fund was established in 2022, focusing on Bitcoin investments, with a current management scale of $2 billion; the Alpha Ethereum Fund was established in 2023, focusing on Ethereum, with a current asset management scale of $4.8 million.
Among them, the Elysium fund is the main business of Heka Funds, initially entering the market with a Bitcoin arbitrage strategy, inspired by a small arbitrage fund that purchased Bitcoin at low prices on Western exchanges and resold it to Japanese exchanges. At first, Elysium mainly engaged in Bitcoin arbitrage, but as the related arbitrage opportunities gradually narrowed, the fund's strategy gradually shifted to stablecoin arbitrage.
In 2019, Fabio Frontini first met Tether's CFO Giancarlo Devasini and was invited to the Bahamas to meet with Tether's banking partner Deltec Bank.
According to Frontini's recollection, Deltec showed him Tether's proof of assets at that time: more than 60% of the reserves were in cash, with the remainder in short-term U.S. Treasury bills, which gave him full confidence in Tether's 1:1 backing. Subsequently, Heka Funds verified Tether's liquidity through a series of small test trades, gradually expanding the trading scale.
With continuous trading and cooperation, Heka Funds has gradually grown to become one of Tether's largest institutional clients, and it can be said that Heka Funds is also a driving force behind Tether's rapid development.
According to a research report released by Protos in 2021, Heka Funds at that time obtained more than $1.5 billion in USDT, accounting for about 1.5% of Tether's total issuance. That year, Heka Funds accumulated about $52 million in profits, far exceeding the $5.8 million profits of its parent company Abraxas, making it one of the most successful funds within the group. In the past 30 days, Arkham data shows that among Tether's main trading counterparts, Heka Funds' trading volume reached $564 million, ranking eighth.
In an interview with Protos in early 2025, Frontini publicly expressed confidence in Tether again. He pointed out that Tether is earning huge interest margin income in the high-interest-rate environment in the United States, and its business model is very simple yet extremely effective. He also quoted Howard Lutnick's (CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald) comments at the 2024 Davos Forum, stating that Tether's assets are mainly held by Cantor, the largest U.S. Treasury broker, further enhancing his confidence in Tether.
It is worth mentioning that earlier this month, on-chain analyst @DesoGames discovered through tracking the flow of funds within a certain period of Tether that its main flow was directed towards Abraxas and Cumberland crypto entities. However, the funds were routed through multiple layers of accounts in a complex and opaque manner, which may aim to conceal the source of illegal transactions.
The analyst further disclosed that HEKA Funds claimed its net assets were €1.3 billion, yet purchased $1.5 billion worth of USDT (Tether issued about $2.5 billion during this period), an amount that clearly exceeds its financial capacity, raising suspicions.
At the same time, the shareholders and directors of HEKA Funds have been found in offshore leak databases, with a complicated background and their true identities difficult to trace. HEKA Funds may just be a shell fund used by Abraxas to disguise its real activities, lacking transparency and credibility.
Currently, from an on-chain perspective, as the cryptocurrency market structure continues to financialize and early stablecoin arbitrage opportunities gradually narrow, Abraxas Capital is also exploring expanding its strategy to a more sustainable Ethereum staking lending ecosystem.
This article is a collaborative reprint from: PANews
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