Thao Tran – Market Making Illiquid, Non-Fungible Assets (S7E14)
Episode publishedPodcast: Flirting with ModelsFlirting with Models
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Today, I'm talking with Thao Tran, cofounding partner at Vamient Capital. This episode was born from a question I had watching the NFT marketplace. How do you make markets in illiquid, nonfungible assets? Clearly, people were doing it, and I wanted to know how it differed from traditional market making. Several people recommended I speak with Thao, and she was kind enough to oblige despite NFT market making being just a small component of what she does. In this conversation, she walks me through how the NFT marketplace has evolved, how she thinks about managing inventory risk, key features tha
My pleasure. I've been a fan of the show for a while. I didn't even once think that I will be here, let alone discussing the niche topic that we are going to discuss. So pleasure's mine.
Well, let's dive in. So let's start with your background because we're going to be talking about cryptocurrency markets. That's not where your career got its start. You actually started at JPMorgan Fixed Income. Can you talk a little bit about how you got started in markets and how you decided to make the switch from traditional finance into cryptocurrency?
I got started in market straight out of school. So when I left school, I first started with an internship at a fixed income desk, but like, an emerging markets desk. And then when I started full time, I moved on to the treasury and the STIRRDS desk. And then more specifically focusing on Japan and whatever Japan desk is trading. That was my background. I was there up until 2017 or 2018. Pretty much just focusing on the same FICC products and then do a little bit of start here and there and focusing on treasuries. And then during COVID time, it was a close friend of mine who asked me to look in
The initial premise for this episode, at least, is this idea of talking about making markets in illiquid markets. And NFTs are certainly an interesting unique market. This is a space that's been through quite an evolution in a short period of time, both in volume and venues and what's being offered, types of NFTs. I was hoping maybe you could talk a little bit about how the space has changed from the earliest days of things like CryptoKitties in 2017 through today. Absolutely.
I think this was a discussion. I didn't create the first ever NFT like, CryptoPunk. I didn't mint them. I didn't own any of them out of mint. I did buy them at some specific point just for profit and no cash
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