Dear Partners,
Our second year has come to a close. I am grateful for your trust. Together, we have supported two operating platforms as they grew toward sustainability. We have made follow-on investments in each platform. We have contributed to a number of efforts in community-led finance, which offered learning and growth. We identified one new investment and further developed our model for sourcing investment opportunities. We raised additional capital to support our existing and future investment conviction.
Market optimistic but volatile, effects ripple through industry
Around us, the market changed dramatically and fitfully. United States policymakers made an about-face in tone toward blockchain over the course of the year. With time, legislators’ openness could enable some of crypto’s most aspirational goals: compliant adoption at scale, and greater experimentation with asset structures. In the interim, investors are speculating aggressively, trying to guess the timing of policy changes and the scale of adoption, particularly as it relates to sovereign stockpiles of cryptoassets.
Our strategy focuses on the long-term. We build platforms that address community financing gaps. These platforms benefit from the efficiencies of mature blockchains and the insights of collective governance. The short-term volatility brought on by speculation might seem insignificant relative to the long-term positive of regulatory clarity. We have, however, seen current market dynamics impact long-term protocol development. Especially troubling is an emerging bear market in collective governance.
Cryptoassets have always been an experiment in functional decentralization. Over the past 16 years, most debates in the space have boiled down to “how much is too little, and how much is too much?” From 2019 to 2021, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) were ground zero for an experiment in extremely decentralized governance. The distribution of ownership and agency were meant to incentivize participation in a new network and circumvent the cold start problem. Five years on, many projects are experiencing the pain of governance development and the slog of explaining that governance to the market. They are questioning whether the benefit is worth the cost.
One such debate has affected our portfolio in multiple ways. Helium is a protocol for decentralized connectivity which is governed by a particularly complex DAO. LongFi Solutions, one of our largest holdings, is a substantial deployer of Helium hotspots. Given our insights into the maturity of the protocol, Garry Elevator holds a small position in Helium’s central asset, HNT. Lastly, the development of governance at Helium DAO affects our understanding of protocol and governance maturity, critical for our investment strategy. We will discuss its recent governance developments at length.
Helium celebrates three years of governance maturity, results mixed
Affectionately dubbed “The People’s Network”, Helium seeks to deploy open source wireless networks in the 860-923 MHz and 2.4/5 GHz bands, delivering functional Internet of Things (IOT) and mobile coverage. We have written at length about this problem space in 2022 and 2023. The protocol’s operation and governance is powered by the Helium Network Token (HNT). The mobile and IOT networks have differing deployment needs and monetization profiles, so they are each managed by a subDAO, MOBILE and IOT.
Each subDAO has its own token. $MOBILE and $IOT tokens are issued to incentivize value creation and to enable governance. The tokens are linked by ownership in HNT; HNT is issued (or “emitted”) to the MOBILE and IOT subDAOs according to a utility score, based on relative amounts of data each network transfers, devices they have deployed, and commitment to governance. Tokens are exchangeable for the pro rata amount of HNT in each treasury.
Each of the three tokens can be used to vote on Helium Improvement Proposals (HIP) relevant to their DAO. Any user can offer a HIP for consideration, but Editors determine which DAOs must vote to approve or deny it. The community discusses each HIP in a dedicated Discord, and the proposal is reviewed by MOBILE and IOT working groups, elected representatives of their respective DAOs. Then, in a process known as vote escrowing, HNT, MOBILE, and IOT holders lock their tokens to voice their preference.
In many ways, this structure represents typical DAO governance. Multiple voting entities certainly add complexity, but processes similar to HIP are widely used and theoretically effective. In practice, however, this governance structure has been subject to highly dynamic operating and market environments. Its successes and failures have been judged against this reality.
Helium’s early years offered the benefits of distribution and collective governance. In 2020, the IOT network deployed faster than any wireless network in history. Since then, governance has been focused on persistent frustrations resulting from growth:
1. The split of value between IOT and MOBILE: The goal of Helium DAO is to deploy assets that will transfer data. IOT displayed significant traction in deploying assets, but MOBILE was the first project to transfer significant amounts of data. Based on realized data flows, one would assume most emissions would go to MOBILE, but IOT was grandfathered into a large share of HNT issuance due to its substantial asset footprint. Throughout 2024, IOT was capturing material HNT emissions while providing di minimis data flow.
2. The growth efforts at IOT: Many participants in the ecosystem put forward HIPs intended to spur IOT adoption. They rarely accompanied these proposals with resources for implementation, leaving those logistics and allocation questions to the Helium Foundation or NOVA Labs (Helium’s core dev entity). As a result, these proposals added resource requirements to capacity constrained organizations.
3. Technical complexity in MOBILE roll-out: The MOBILE network first launched over the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), an unlicensed innovation band which allowed MOBILE to operate without purchasing spectrum licenses. The technical realities of the network didn’t match its economic attractiveness; calls dropped frequently when moving between Helium towers and more traditional hardware. MOBILE issuance created significant CBRS incentives, which had to be unwound by HIPs 101, 113, and 139.
4. Gaming vulnerabilities related to hex boosting: Service provider boosts were intended to rapidly accelerate the pace of MOBILE hotspot deployment. Boosts inherently contained two assumptions: first that proof-of-coverage was a robust primitive which couldn’t be gamed, and second, that service providers would select quality deployment sites and begin rapidly offloading data to them. Both assumptions were called into question, spurring months of community deliberation (HIPs 84, 107, 108, 121, 122, 133). The problem – incentivizing local insight without massive gaming – is still far from solved.
These processes stressed the entire community quite severely. Critics of collective governance would say that deliberations took far too long and contributed little to operating advances. Advocates would say that these processes are critical for retaining the community dynamics that led to the rapid deployment of IOT. The moderate approach might be that highly performant collective governance was required to navigate these challenges well, and Helium’s DAO fell well short of such a lofty standard.
Governance seen as increasing drag, community attempts to simplify, fail miserably
Criticism of collective governance was made stronger by growth which seemed to proceed in spite of governance rather than because of it. In the middle of 2024, Nova Labs began to develop a “brownfield strategy” which would enable private wifi networks with distributed access points to run the Helium protocol. These installations do not receive proof-of-coverage rewards, circumventing the gaming debate.
The sites also drive the system toward enterprise business development rather than retail style growth, trading some of the benefits of permissionless coordination for more controllable processes which benefit from the clarity of centralized communications. Sites would still participate in distributed value, but NOVA Labs could push updates over the air, allowing small teams to add substantial value to the network. In an ideal world, this strategy would allow for far fewer governance decisions and far fewer deciders.
This dichotomy alone seemed unlikely to spur a governance re-organization. A HIP to that end was discussed jokingly in the Discord as HIP 666. Gradual improvement of a complex governance structure seemed a more probable, but excruciatingly slow path to resolution of tension. This détente was upended by the election, as members began to fear the drag of governance might grow to a debilitating dead weight.
With a new administration voicing pro-crypto views, markets rallied dramatically – the S&P Crypto Broad Digital Markets Index +15.3% in the two days following election returns. Teams cheered the advent of regulatory clarity, while hurriedly cleaning house and removing any impediments to market euphoria. As governance contributor Chris Ferebee (Discord @ferebee) put it: “A bull market is exactly when investors have the least time available to understand a complicated model.”
To that end, community members, including ferebee, aggregated frustration with existing governance into HIP 138, a proposal to collapse the subDAO structure, returning to a single decision-making entity and a single token. IOT and MOBILE would cease issuance of their own tokens, and holders would be able to exchange subDAO tokens for HNT based on the pro rata share of treasury. The proposal also addressed concerns related to the MOBILE and IOT split, granting substantially more emissions to MOBILE, and increasing the emissions available to miners by sunsetting grants to investors.
The whole point of the proposal was clarity, allowing the single token to more directly participate in upside and Nova Labs to more rapidly advance execution. Collective governance, however, offered one last indignity. The proposal affected all three DAOs, and therefore required three “yes” votes. On November 22, 2024 the HNT and IOT votes passed, but a large holder of MOBILE (“the whale”) locked their tokens at the last minute and voted down the measure, forking the DAOs, and delivering more confusion than existed before.
Simplification energy magnifies over ensuing months
The situation was summarily resolved, but the hoped-for clarity was lost. The energy to simplify collective governance snowballed toward energy to eradicate it. The CEO of Nova Labs, Amir Haleem (via his Discord handle capcom.) delivered a stark indictment on November 23rd, writing “Have I mentioned that I don't think people have any idea wtf they are doing and shouldn't be allowed to vote on changes?”
Earlier in the debate, Heleem had noted that he believed governance and ownership could be untethered. On November 14th, one user commented that the network was never meant to be fully decentralized; “It’s decentralised in the sense that no one entity has built the network lol.” Haleem responded, “Ultimately I think that’s what matter (sic). The rest is mostly negative and a drag on anything moving quickly”.
capcom. (November 21, 2024) – “this governance process is not constructive at all. the price you pay for decentralization is that the flow of $ goes to the participants, not that it has to be some maximally decentralized governance system. the HIP process was my doing and I will happily lead its undoing”
capcom. (November 21, 2024) – A democracy is the wrong construct for what needs to look more like a business that has to generate revenue and make hard decisions…”
Simplification advocates and Haleem alike pointed to more centralized alternatives as preferable options to more community-driven governance.
Haleem (November 21, 2024): “this governance process has been a net-negative to helium imo. not that the community shouldnt have a voice or that we dont want to hear it, but the random nature of HIP releases and pace of seemingly unrelated changes is not a good thing.”
User d.anon_ “Jupiter exchange is a great example of this. Development is fast paced and things get done.”
Haleem “Solana is another. they have a very robust [request for comment] process, but the core team sets the roadmap and does the work”
HIP 141, proposed in January 2025, moves Helium toward a roadmap-driven governance approach, largely controlled by NOVA Labs. Community calls and broader conversation with IOT and MOBILE working groups will serve as proxies for collective input, but ballots should decline dramatically.
These revisions seem to imply a failure of Helium’s experiment in collective governance, with most of the blame falling on decentralized decision-making. Haleem went so far as to say “nothing important gets built by committee”. We recognize that collective governance can feel quite slow at times. Other times, as with the vote, it can feel fast and chaotic and entirely unproductive. We will argue though that HIP 138 was not a failure, but the system working as designed (though not as intended). We will also argue that this also holds lessons for the more persistent frustrations with Helium governance.
Trust at a relative low around HIP 138, adversarial behavior more likely
Trustlessness is a word often associated with blockchain technology. It implies an ability to transact with anyone, regardless of your prior relationship. When a decentralized ecosystem is built, however, a certain amount of trust is required in the form of shared values. Communities can dramatically enhance that trust by codifying explicit long-term commitments in governance and onchain, but they struggle to function in trust’s absence.
In the days leading up to the HIP 138 vote, community comments implied substantially eroding trust. Long-simmering issues flared into open conflict, spurred by fears that certain groups were consolidating power and economics. User brainstormer insinuated malintent when he asked Amir Haleem,
“@capcom. Are you holding back on any major big announcement after 1/15 when we’re back on a single token”.
User Elon Tusk piled on, “that would make sense given how much this impacts the system.”
Other users felt that Nova Labs and institutional investors – previously unwilling to exert influence on governance given SEC policy – were now tipping the scales for their own benefit. Admist debate about changing commitments to the IOT network, user nosmaster89 accused Nova Labs of exerting unprecedented influence.
Nosmaster 89: “you also said nova wouldn’t vote on HIPs”
capcom. “Yup, we changed our mind and explained our rationale for that. Happens”
Nosmaster89 “it suited you at the moment to vote, that’s your rational (sic)”
Lastly, many MOBILE holders complained about the implied exchange rate for their tokens. MOBILE was exchangeable for the HNT in its treasury, but some holders had seen value above its current HNT balance. Other members of the community dismissed them as speculators, now getting their just desserts as price moved to “treasury floor”.
jhbr821: “People really like projecting their anger over their sh**ty trading here”
capcom.: “absolutely bizarre to watch”
theowner117: “As a very Large mobile holder. You are ok losing 50%? And having to wait till HNT price compensates?”
capcom.: “where is the 50% loss?”
theowner117: “On your swap back versus previous swap rates.. Or that doesnt count as a loss for you lol”
jhbr821: “That’s not a loss for anyone lol”
These statements are clear elaborations of differing priorities. They’re also a bit of a troll. In high trust environments, the former can be worked through and the latter ignored. In low trust environments, however, priorities will be forcefully expressed through adversarial behavior in ways that might be indistinguishable from trolling.
Liquidity opens many adversarial vectors, exacerbates complexity
Members of the community had been hammering on the value of the MOBILE token in the days and weeks leading up to the vote.
MondoARG: “How was it not obvious that MOBILE was always a utility token?”
Haleem also commented on X in October 2024 that “newly created HNT sits…almost like gold backing for currency in the old days…[subtokens] can be redeemed for HNT via the treasury using the helium wallet. again like being able to take a dollar bill and exchange it for 0.1oz of gold in the old days…effectively speaking, the true value of MOBILE and IOT tokens are the amount of HNT in each treasury divided by the total number of MOBILE or IOT tokens in circulation...[MOBILE’s current premium to the HNT in treasury] is a bonus.”
These perspectives are correct but incomplete. If we limit our understanding of MOBILE’s value to the treasury, we might see a “no” vote from MOBILE as dysfunctional, incompetent and irrational. If we account for other forms of value, price fluctuation and subsequent actions become more understandable.
In Community Currencies: The Price Of Attention And Cost Of Influence In A Networked Age -or-The Price Of Entry And Cost Of Exit In A Networked Age, Puja Olhaver argues that in any community, voice and exit are the two responses to dissatisfaction. The price of voice is the amount of influence required to vote as well as the opportunity cost of using those resources elsewhere. The cost of exit is the opportunity forgone by exiting the community and deploying resources in some other place. Loyalty is a mitigating factor, which incents participants to use voice rather than exit.
In the specific context of Helium, the price of voice is the amount of tokens which must be locked in order to influence a vote, coupled with the opportunity cost of locking those tokens in escrow. The cost of exit is represented by the returns of Helium-associated tokens relative to the broader markets or the US Dollar. Loyalty, best measured in hindsight, is the realized difference between the two.
In Helium’s complex system, each participant can express voice in three separate spaces – HNT, MOBILE, and IOT. They have the option for exit to many more spaces. As a result, the MOBILE/HNT swap not only reflects past and potential value accrual in treasury, but it also reflects the relative value of governance in each space.
In the early parts of 2024, MOBILE was undertaking consequential decisions, particularly related to hex boosting. Further, these deliberations were only open to MOBILE holders. Given the implications those decisions had on token emissions and hotspot returns, the value of swapping into MOBILE to exercise voice was high. MOBILE was also a low liquidity token in a speculative environment, bolstering its USD value relative to more liquid HNT.
Through the summer, MOBILE struggled to maintain its strength. Alt coins sold off strongly, and MOBILE’s lower liquidity hurt on the way down as it had helped on the way up. MOBILE underperformed HNT in USD markets, decaying the swap rate. There was also a relative governance lull as boosted hexes were capped, deployments were relatively stable, and MNOs were still in testing phase on the network.
The net result: MOBILE holders saw their ability to express voice in HNT decline by more than 80% in 2024. HIP 138 was structured as a cascading proposal and would move to implementation if the HNT vote passed, regardless of the MOBILE or IOT votes. Explicitly, the message to the community was “if you disagree with this proposal, swap into HNT in order to express that dissatisfaction”, exacerbating the effects of the decline.
At the time of the vote, the value of the whale’s entire MOBILE holdings, if swapped into HNT, stood somewhere between 1-2M HNT. They would not have cracked the 50 largest voters on the proposal. Had their holdings been 4x higher, they would have been voter #10. One could argue that on a relative basis, MOBILE holders might never have enough voice to win a Helium vote, given that the largest HNT voter cast 72M “yes” votes. The swap rate more likely sapped the energy to whip other votes, rather than the ability to win outright.
As the potential for meaningful voice in HNT declined, removing a host of more functional possibilities, it clarified the cost of voice in MOBILE and created adversarial opportunities. HIP 138 established a final exchange rate, essentially a valuation floor based on remaining HNT emissions and some incentives in the proposal, estimated across the Discord at somewhere between 7,000-8,000 MOBILE per HNT. The token was trading at roughly these levels in the days around the vote, implying an expectation the vote would pass, but also implying minimal downside for the swap rate if the vote failed. HIP 138 included a MOBILE burn and some additional emissions of HNT foregone by HST holders; if the vote failed, the worst case exchange rate might be 9,000-10,000, a 30% downside from current levels.
Advocates of HIP 138 would still say that a “no” vote seems illogical on the grounds that proposal failure would forego any future HNT emissions. In order to generate any future value from their hardware, MOBILE members would have to rebuild their tokenomics independent of HNT, a true fork. Further, they would have to rebuild core infrastructure as well as a core dev entity; Nova Labs would not continue to work on the fork.
If a MOBILE holder felt, however, that their existing hotspots might not perform well going forward, they might prioritize the value of their existing tokens over the value of their future production. More gently, if those holders felt that their early production had added more value to the network than was being recognized, they may hold out for higher compensation. If the chaos led to a restructured deal, there might be substantial upside for holders of MOBILE; abandoning HIP 138 altogether might mean a return to the swap rates of early 2024, more than 400% gains in HNT terms.
Add to this a sense for the cost of exit, and the decision becomes even more interesting as MOBILE holdings had declined nearly 70% in USD terms since the start of 2024. One might argue that the price of exit had already been paid and the use of voice, heavily incentivized. The alternatives to recover USD loss lie either in speculating on tokens over which emigrees might have little influence or substantial adversarial behavior to maximize MOBILE value.
In his 2024 annual letter, Andrew Carreon of Emeth Value Capital discusses the impact of reflexivity on strategy. Crypto investors often speak of the more widely accepted, positive concept, in which rising price brings in more investors, begetting higher price. Carreon explores an alternate reality, in which price declines beget price declines eventually arriving at such point that seemingly irrational, risky strategies become not feasible, but optimal.
The HIP 138 vote should be shocking but not surprising. The whale eventually rescinded their vote, describing it as a protest vote whose consequences they did not fully understand. Critics of the decision – and collective governance more broadly – also misunderstood the ways their structure incentivized the decision and the pace with which decision parameters can change thanks to liquid incentives. This type of emergence, a revelation of new pathways and priorities, is the point of broadly decentralized decision-making. Sometimes it works for us. Sometimes it does not.
Any DAO practicing governance with a liquid token needs to possess significant trust, strong values alignment, and a large number of governance guardrails in order to buffer against these forces. These are exactly the kind of buffers that Helium DAO needed to address its issues with boosting and certainly its issues in HIP 138. In the current market, projects are launching tokens as quickly as possible. Given the impact liquidity has on collective behavior, any community launching a widely distributed, liquid token needs simple governance or mature governance.
Helium shift implies strategic focus, right sizing for maturity
Helium’s governance seemed neither performant nor mature enough for the liquidity of its token. Rather than substantially diminish the liquidity of its token – almost impossible given the role the token plays in machine-to-machine financings – the DAO substantially simplified its governance process. There will be implications for its long-term strategy.
In the short to medium term, this should accrue material value to the token as the new governance direction better reflects Helium’s values and priorities. At the outset of its DAO, Helium sought to build a network outside of traditional telcos. Over time, due to difficulty with deployment incentives and successful enterprise engagement, Helium migrated toward building in concert with major network operators (MNOs). If the early vision was an independent, valuable network, Helium is now more focused on building something valuable. The independence can wait.
The new roadmap-driven governance will likely increase the influence of Nova Labs and other large technical actors (such as MNOs) by moving large swaths of procedure, such as agenda setting, out of community control. This may diminish the vibrance of community conversation, and therefor diminish avenues for exploring new structures and economic agreements, particularly in areas of the model Helium has struggled to realize.
We don’t expect Helium to spend substantial resources on the development of modular incentives for bottoms-up placement of hotspots, choosing instead to rely on the insights of service providers to guide deployment and provide incentives. We wonder about the growth and development of Helium Mobile, another bottom-up exercise which has struggled to educe subscribers.
As we have discussed, collective governance can at times be chaos, but it holds the potential for productive chaos. Further, participants can trust the durability of solutions, as the collective protecting the economic arrangements that result. We expect users to be somewhat skeptical of Helium’s promises in the current structure. While Helium’s execution and the structures may be more stable in a centralized model, concerns about protocol take rate will likely permeate community calls.
In some ways, our expectation for the system might best be expressed as Spotify rather than any counterpart in crypto today. Spotify modernizes the music industry, but it also enforces its pre-existing structure. Just as Spotify with the labels, we expect that Helium will continuously struggle to achieve profitability on MNO offload and may try to squeeze parties with lower agency in order to create some breathing room.
Olhaver’s work reminds that “creating a community is an act of exclusion”. The decisions to diminish or exclude certain voices and focus on a subset of needs are not inherently good or bad. They do reflect values, however, and thereby affect value. HIP 138 and 141 collapsed some distance between Helium’s processes and its values, making the system more functional, if slightly less committed to “The People’s Network” at any cost.
We should give the DAO and all involved credit for having some serious values around which to make frank choices. Most DAOs laid bare reveal a prime motivator of “number go up”. When gains fail to materialize, governance processes flounder. As Joan Didion says, “one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home”. We believe that Helium may prove a durable construct, while also leaving significant space for models which prioritize grassroots insights.
Owning tokens and building platforms amidst these pressures
Initial returns to this strategy are promising. Recent pricing agreements with MNOs revealed data rates that approach sustainability, well higher than our initial assumptions. We believe that the DAO’s progress toward value creation is underappreciated, even as we have concerns about longer-term value drivers. Garry Elevator is long HNT.
LongFi Solutions, in which we are an investor, continues to be an active and constructive member of the Helium community. The team will likely deepen its substantial engagement with the protocol in the coming months given the value of their technical skills in enterprise deployment. We also expect LongFi to expand its role a useful proxy for smaller participants looking to aggregate their voices and influence new governance processes.
Despite the economic promise of these developments, a medium and a long-term uncertainty has also emerged as decision-making becomes more centralized and Helium’s industry position more clear. Platform risk becomes more significant and less knowable; diversification across platforms might be the only reasonable response.
Lastly, this experience deepens our conviction that collective governance and blockchain networks exist on a spectrum of maturities. We continue to seek out exceptionally mature governance ecosystems to bring onchain. We continue to emphasize simplicity of governance in the early days of a project, particularly when liquidity is unavoidable (as in DataDAOs and other machine-to-machine contexts. We are willing to experiment with ownership structures which alleviate the pressures of liquidity on governance, but we are also willing to avoid token issuance where appropriate.
Our latest addition to the portfolio, yet undisclosed, is a cooperative building independent distribution infrastructure for particular local communities. The co-op is committed to governance and ownership incentives which are (for the foreseeable future) quite illiquid and offchain. We find this prudent. We believe the community’s foundation on shared values is clear, and we expect this fuzzy consensus to mature into remarkably durable community governance and highly economic products.
A parting thought
We have been talking about the costs of collective governance, but I recently read a wonderful description of its benefits in a small memoir, Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Build a Church. A chronicle of the conception and construction of St. John’s Abbey Church, the book provides a clear-eyed look at the frustrations of community deliberation. It also offers that amidst all the tangents and random questions that, “discussion of such details seems trivial until one reflects that it was attention to such details that resulted in the quiet integrity of every part of this great building.”
Integrity, sometimes termed “quality” in other markets, is what we’re after. We continue to explore the structures that lead to quality and the make-up of the people that foster them. We continue to explore how distributed organizations deepen the integrity of markets and the integrity of communities. We continue to explore how blockchain and other technologies are transformative for the health and longevity of these organizations.
We continue to invest capital behind those hypotheses and are grateful for that privilege. We’ll continue to update you on what we find.
John Garry
Partner, Garry Elevator
Disclosure: Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this post are solely those of the author(s) in their individual capacity and are not the views of Garry Elevator, LLC or its affiliates (together with its affiliates, “Garry Elevator”). Certain information contained herein may have been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Garry Elevator. Garry Elevator believes that the information provided is reliable but has not independently verified the non-material information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This post may contain links to third-party websites (“External Websites”). The existence of any such link does not constitute an endorsement of such websites, the content of the websites, or the operators of the websites. These links are provided solely as a convenience to you and not as an endorsement by us of the content on such External Websites. The content of such External Websites is developed and provided by others and Garry Elevator takes no responsibility for any content therein. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in this blog are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others.
The content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as the basis for an investment decision, and is not, and should not be assumed to be, complete. The contents herein are not to be construed as legal, business, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisors for those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by Garry Elevator, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. This letter does not constitute investment advice or an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase any limited partner interests in any investment vehicle managed by Garry Elevator. An offer or solicitation of an investment in any Garry Elevator investment vehicle will only be made pursuant to an offering memorandum, limited partnership agreement and subscription documents, and only the information in such documents should be relied upon when making a decision to invest.
Performance Disclosure – The extracted performance results shown include the extracted performance of the liquid portfolio of the Fund, which have not been compiled, reviewed or audited by an independent accountant and may reflect estimated results. The hypothetical scenarios described herein are for illustrative purposes only and the asset allocation used in connection with such hypothetical scenarios is not the actual asset allocation of the Fund, of which the liquid portfolio is only one part. Results are based on the Fund’s internal books and records as maintained by HC Global Fund Services and are subject to adjustment. These returns are shown only to demonstrate Garry Elevator’s experience in managing an investment portfolio and returns generated by the liquid portion of the portfolio held by the Fund may vary substantially from the results of a separate pooled investment vehicle’s liquid-only portfolio. The Fund’s overall performance is available on request.
The extracted performance results shown herein are based on the returns that might have been obtained had all of the assets of the Fund been allocated to the liquid-only portion of the Fund’s investment activities and do not reflect the performance of the assets of the Fund that were actually allocated to that portion of the Fund’s portfolio. As a result, the returns shown may differ from those that would have been obtained had all of the Fund’s assets actually been allocated to the liquid-only portion of the Fund’s investment activities.
The results calculated herein are similar to results generated through the use of a model and back-testing, is for illustrative purposes only, and is not necessarily indicative of performance that would have been actually achieved if a pooled investment vehicle utilized the liquid-only portion of the Fund’s strategy during the relevant periods. Further, back-testing results are not necessarily indicative of a strategy’s future performance. The inherent limitations of a model and back-testing include, but are not limited to, (i) potential errors in the model tested and the processes used for back-testing, (ii) model results do not represent the impact that material economic and market factors might have on an investment adviser’s decision-making process and (iii) there are numerous factors related to financial markets generally, many of which cannot be fully accounted for in the preparation of back-tested results and all of which may adversely affect actual investment results.
Performance is calculated based on the capital account of a hypothetical limited partner that invested in the Fund’s liquid positions from the date of the fund's first investment and made no additional contributions or withdrawals after such initial investment. A two percent (2%) management fee and has been imputed to such performance as if such fee was payable monthly and a twenty percent (20%) performance allocation has been imputed to the portion of such performance in excess of an annualized return of six percent (6%), compounded annually, as if such allocation was made at the end of the 2023 calendar year, in each case, in accordance with the terms of the Offering Documents. An estimated expense ratio of [0.25%] per annum was imputed on such performance as an estimate for fund operating expenses and trading fees, but expenses for an actual investment in a fund making liquid-only investments could be higher or lower depending on a variety of factors, and may vary substantially from the estimate used herein. Performance also reflects the reinvestment of dividends, earnings, staking rewards, and any similar types of income. Returns experienced by individual investors would have varied based on their dates of investment and will differ based upon actual operating expenses. Hypothetical performance results are for illustrative purposes only and are not necessarily indicative of performance that would actually have been achieved if an investment utilized the strategy during the relevant periods. Please contact Garry Elevator for further information regarding these assumptions and calculations. Hypothetical performance results are for illustrative purposes only. There are frequently sharp differences between hypothetical and actual performance results.