Coinbase Teams Up With One River to Offer Separately Managed Accounts

Cryptocurrency fund manager One River Digital Asset Management has teamed up with U.S. exchange Coinbase (COIN) to offer separately managed accounts (SMA), a popular alternative to mutual funds in traditional finance where affluent investors hold assets directly and use an external asset manager.

Announced Friday in a blog post, clients of Coinbase Prime can use the ONE Digital SMA to avail themselves of One River’s trading expertise while holding all their assets on the Prime platform or in Coinbase Custody.

Coinbase Prime clients prefer to own digital assets in their own segregated account, but also want the same quality of investment management services that they are accustomed to in traditional investments, according to Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional.

“ONE Digital SMA is the best of both worlds,” Tejpaul said in a statement. “It delivers market-leading access and secure custody via Coinbase Prime and institutional grade investment products and services from One River Digital.”

Coinbase is not the first exchange to offer SMAs. Late last year, New York City-based crypto exchange Gemini teamed up with 3iQ Digital Assets and digital asset manager Bitria to offer investors a new digital asset SMA platform. Gemini later acquired Bitria.

Coinbase was an investor in a $41 million Series A funding round for One River Digital, a cryptocurrency-focused subsidiary of One River Asset Management, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based investment firm that manages approximately $2.5 billion of institutional assets.