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The past two decades of media, film, and television have been highly saturated with superhero content. Every year, it feels like there’s a new blockbuster film showcasing the origin story of the latest and greatest superhero. Heroes and villains aren’t the only ones with origin stories, though. Have you ever wondered how the businesses we come across in our everyday lives came to be? Over the last couple of years in particular, there has been a major influx of entrepreneurs, start-ups, and freelancers hitting the market, each with their own uniquely individual origin story.
The Ember Fund is a web3 investment platform app that brings the world of cryptocurrency index investing directly to the fingertips of every day retail investors. Today, their groundbreaking application helps over 700,000 people invest in digital assets in a way normally only reserved for Accredited investors or investors with a net worth of $200,000 or more. Ember Fund believes that everyone–not just the rich–should have the same access to elite investing opportunities. With increased education of blockchain technology and adoption of cryptocurrencies, the more democratic and fairer our global financial system will be.
Who is Ember Fund?
Before getting into the details and complexities of the Ember Fund application itself, it can be telling to understand the leadership of the organization itself.
The Ember Fund was first imagined by three technologists working at GumGum on sophisticated modern-day artificial intelligence. The AI technology they were creating was state-of-the-art and capable of significant impact. These same three AI professionals represent the C-suite leadership at Ember Fund.
Alex Wang, Guillaume Torche, and Mario Lazaro are the entrepreneurs who spearheaded the development and creation of Ember Fund. Before taking his position of leadership as the CEO of Ember Fund, Wang was a lead product manager at GumGum and recognized the danger of how AI was being used to centralize power. Having invested in crypto since 2016, he felt the calling to help democratize finance to create a more equitable society.
Torche runs technology, blockchain strategy, and D2C growth at Ember Fund. Not only that, but he also built and developed Ember’s backend. Most notably, though, the master of computer science was also the main architect of the elite workflow that allows for crypto gifting. Torche is an expert in blockchain technology, smart contracts, and everything data engineering. Before taking his position as the Chief Technology Officer at Ember Fund, Torche led the data engineering team at GumGum.
Finally, Lazaro is the Chief Information Officer at Ember Fund. He is an expert when it comes to building Ethereum smart contracts and was a primary contributor to the Set Protocol codebase. Prior to founding Ember Fund alongside Wang and Torche, Lazaro led the Ad Server team at GumGum, which was the second largest engineering team in the company at that time.
Needless to say, the founders behind Ember Fund have been investing in cryptocurrencies through multiple cycles and have a firm understanding of blockchain technologies.
Before Founding the Fund
In 2016, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies started to emerge as popular players in the marketplace. At first, the various blockchain technologies didn’t garner that much more attention than their predecessors like eCash in the 1990s, or B-Money about a decade later.
However, there was something different about Bitcoin. Bitcoin launched in 2008 through the publication of a whitepaper, but it wasn’t until after the wake of the housing market crash that Bitcoin started to gain a lot of recognition in the public eye.
This is because cryptocurrency presented an opportunity for the development of a financial system that wasn’t reliant on a single government, so the concept of decentralization spread like wildfire as the solution to counter the centralized power of the central banks.
That is what caught the attention of the founders-to-be who were working at GumGum; the concept of a decentralized financial system that truly put the power of wealth building into the palms of everyday consumers. However, this still wasn’t quite enough of a kick in the pants to launch Ember Fund. Not yet, anyway.
The Inspiration to Get It off the Ground
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency generated a lot of buzz after they entered the mainstream marketplace. Many consumers couldn’t wait to jump into the new world of digital financing that seemed to offer limitless potential, profits, and financial gains.
However, like with any new marketspace that comes to fruition, there were (and still are) a number of flaws that plagued the various blockchain platforms. The main culprit being, of course, human corruption, greed, and irresponsible risk-taking. Malicious users saw blockchain technology and the emergence of cryptocurrencies as the perfect opportunity to take advantage of unwitting or less technically savvy consumers. This ill intent quickly gave blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies a poor reputation for being shady, unstable, and certainly unsustainable as a reliable currency.
Finally, Alex Wang, Guillaume Torche, and Mario Lazaro felt it was time to take the plunge and go after the mission of offering vetted assets wrapped in expertly-crafted portfolios that are auto-rebalanced on a periodic basis. In contrast to many of the DeFi platforms that required Metamasks and other clunky onboarding experiences, the co-founders envisioned user-friendly navigation with educational snippets to guide the investor journey.
In 2018, the trio announced their departure at GumGum and began working on their idea of the future of decentralized personal finance, the Ember Fund. Wang, Torche, and Lazaro believed that packaging cryptocurrencies in easy-to-understand indexes could even the playing field for retail investors just like they did in the equities markets. Ember Fund aims to do just that by being a trusted source investors can go to for vetted web3 investment opportunities, taking a lot of the guesswork out of investing in a cryptocurrency portfolio.
Bringing the Keys to the Castle to the Consumers’ Fingertips
The entire goal of Ember Fund is to make investing in cryptocurrency and other forms of blockchain technology far more consumer-friendly yet retain the principles of decentralized finance. This is a field that is burdened with extreme technological complexity, and as such, there is a significant barrier of entry placed onto cryptocurrency investing.
Those who have the information, have it, and those who don’t, don’t. Not only that, but the cryptocurrency market is extremely volatile and beyond challenging to predict. All of these factors come together and play into the creation of a dangerously difficult investment marketplace that is essentially completely unregulated and full of FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
Ember Fund aims to cut out a lot of the noise that’s involved with cryptocurrency investing by offering consumers a variety of custom-crafted investment portfolios of the highest potential digital assets and projects. Each of these investment portfolios is designed to operate differently in the crypto marketplace and makes use of a variety of investment strategies and tactics.
The Originals, for example, is a portfolio that regularly rebalances between Bicoin and Ethereum on a quarterly basis. The Metaverse Index, on the other hand, is a portfolio that spreads investments across the 18 top digital assets weighted by market cap. The rebalancing aspect is of huge value given that they are fee-free and ensure your portfolio is optimized in such a volatile assets class.
What makes Ember Fund different from many other crypto investing apps is the self-custody aspect, which means all of your transactions are verifiable on-chain. They are your keys, therefore your crypto. You have full control over your assets.
Where Ember Fund Is Today
Today, Ember Fund is helping over 700,000 people invest in cryptocurrency portfolios each and every day. The groundbreaking application has also facilitated millions of transactions in its short time on the market.
Today, the cryptocurrency investing application continues to work on making cryptocurrency and blockchain technology investments more accessible to the everyday consumer. In turn, they hope this brings more power and control to the individual over their financial health and wealth building. This is, after all, supposed to be the goal of a decentralized financial system in the first place.
Paving a Path Forward Together
We are often stronger together than we ever are as single individuals; this has been proven time and time again throughout all of history. When it comes to the future of finance, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are very likely here to stay. However, the role it plays in our everyday lives is still very much changing, shifting, and evolving.
Organizations like Ember Fund are constantly working to make the world of cryptocurrency investing easier to understand and more accessible to all. These efforts are done in the hopes that it will bring us all to a more financially equal place in the future.
Wrapping up on Ember Fund
Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology have been around for a lot longer than most of us actually realize. With their true origins dating back to the 1990s and that first ever cryptocurrency eCash, the groundwork for blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum have long been under construction.
Today, modern investment applications like Ember Fund are working to make the cryptocurrency marketplace a much more consumer-friendly one. If you’re interested in learning more about cryptocurrency in general or would like to explore some of the portfolio options offered by Ember Fund, you can download the Ember Fund app right here and get started with your crypto investing today.
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