Against the backdrop of November’s crypto market carnage, Jakob Palmstierna, CEO of trading firm GSR, cuts a surprisingly serene figure.

Dressed in a blue-and-white checkered shirt, a dark cardigan and tortoiseshell glasses, the softly spoken 41-year-old is eager to stress that GSR’s more conservative approach stands it in good stead now that high-flying rival Alameda Research — which, like GSR, also operated both trading and venture capital arms — has crashed and burned.

“Alameda was artificially pumping up a lot of crypto projects by utilizing customer funds to flood them with assets in billions of dollars,” Palmstierna said in an interview in London on Monday, referring to reports that the investment firm founded by Sam Bankman-Fried received funds from crypto exchange FTX, another of his companies. FTX didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Now that Alameda, which shut up shop in November as its sister firm FTX filed for bankruptcy protection, is out of the picture, Palmstierna said valuations for crypto venture capital deals are starting to fall.

“Now is an opportunity to actually deploy capital if you really believe in the space,” he said. “There is a lot of assets which are now looking at very good value. Which means that it might not be a VC, it might be a follow-on type investment.”

(By Andrew Rummer)