Photo by Dmitry Demidko on Unsplash
Photo by Linda Xie on LinkedIn

Linda Xie

Co-Founder & Managing Director

Scalar Capital

POSITION

Co-Founder & Managing Director

COMPANY

Scalar Capital

COUNTRY

USA/China

Website

Scalar Capital

SCENE

Business

SOCIAL

LinkedIn

Twitter

What makes Linda Xie a Global Shaker?

Linda Xie is the co-founder and managing director at Scalar Capital, an investment management company that focuses on cryptoassets. Prior to founding Scalar Capital, she was a product manager at Coinbase, the world’s largest digital currency exchange, and a portfolio risk analyst at AIG (American Insurance Group).

The crypto hedge fund founder first became interested in Bitcoin in 2011, as she was “fascinated by the idea of not having a single entity controlling money.” Linda’s parents grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and had to deal with asset seizure, so the idea of decentralised finance greatly interested her.

“It was fascinating to me that bitcoin was a currency that no government could take away from someone or control,” Linda explained during an AMA session with Elpha.

“Growing up in the US I also saw my parents sending money back to their family in China and felt the process was unnecessarily complicated and expensive.”

She joined Coinbase in 2014, after the crypto industry began to become legitimised through regulators and legitimate merchants that believed in cryptocurrency.

At Coinbase, she worked with regulators and law enforcement regarding compliance for digital assets. As an internal-facing project manager, her team worked on tools for the compliance, legal, finance, business operations, support, and fraud teams at the company. Linda also ran the Coinbase book club.

Once Coinbase started to experience hypergrowth and shifted to a large FinTech company, Linda decided to leave the crypto exchange and start her own business to “dive deeper” into crypto. As such, she found Scalar Capital, a cryptoassets fund that invests in blockchain companies in exchange for tokens, with a focus on privacy technology. The $20 million fund currently has 18 projects.

According to Linda, Scalar Capital has an edge over other crypto hedge funds due to the connections, knowledge and understanding the company has of the industry.

“I have a strong understanding of what makes a crypto asset worth betting on,” she told she256. “Not everything that we bet on is going to be a winner, but our goal is to make sure that we have the winners in our bets.”

In 2019, she was listed in Forbes’ 30 Under 30: Finance edition.

Tags: blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralisation, decentralised finance, finance, women

Last updated: October 1, 2019