Maybe I just misundertood. I agree in the following:
A 'tradable' crypto fund isn't different (at least in the core) than investing in a basket of assets ( same as a investment fund which most banks offer).
HOWEVER! (and it's a big one), crypto fund can offer a flexibility which banks can only dream for. Main thing is that these type of funds doesn't have interests aligned with the customer since the bank basically relies on fees on the customer itself, and no 'real profits'.
It's also remarkable all the hidden fees, since the fund manager from the bank usually will pick the assets which HE/SHE is allowed to (and not necessarily the optimal ones). P.e products from the same branch
TL;DR banks incentives aren't necessarily the same with the customer. A problem which doesn't happen in crypto (if rules are clear from the beginning, of course).
Dunno if I'm missing something... I'm answering your question or raving to much? :/
I do agree with crypto being more transparent, maybe less fees and less politics, though the later may still happen when a fund is run by a team.
I try to make a different point, the investment fund and the open market tradebility thereof.
Bank or other institutional investment funds are not tradeable on the open market. Peeps trade with the fund itself and pays/receives the intrinsic value of the fund, whilst the value of such fund is not full of sentiment and whatnot. My take is this is wanted, in a centralised setup but also in a decentralised setup. I mean, it is wanted that the valuation is done purely on assets it holds and knows the market value of these assets.
Well, not all investment funds are like that, for instance, a fund investing in paintings or other art will have difficulties establishing a price point for each such asset. But that aside, SEED doesnt own such type of assets.
For SEED you like to see more liquidity in the market so peeps can buy and sell like stock or general crypto on the open market. I wonder why you want this? And/Or this 'degrades' the investment fund value from pure valuation based on known assets with known prices, to an investment fund valued not only on the previous but also on a range of other non-financial factors, such as sentiment, emotions. Any open market trading system has this effect. Maybe ok for shares in businesses. But is this, in your opinion, wanted for investment funds?
As I see things, 'backed' value doesn't matter if there's no liquidity ON A REAL MARKET to sustain that value (what I can buy now at the marked price without moving the market by orders of magnitude).
Lack of liquidity creates a 'mirage' of value, or an illusion (as you like to call it). And there's not a better recipe than that to get 'dissapointed investors' later.
Most projects use 'ICO' funds and allocate 1-3% of the supply to a liquidity pool or to get CEX listings ('liquidity incentives'). Since we had a 'fair launch' and everybody payed for their own tokens, such a thing wasn't available since day one (Since we raised funds at 1$ and denominated a 'fair base value'), hence we were going to need this later.
Having said that...
Maybe this is not needed for traditional investment funds since the value of the basket of all the assets defines the value now (and hence enabling liquidity impacts the token price in new ways).
But I'm slowly changing the way I see seed from a 'typical investmend fund working in the crypto environment with HIVE & HE resources as the infrastructural backend' to 'a profit based DAO based on HIVE which compiles a group of power users which invests in abc to xyz...''
What I mean with this is that SEED started as my little kid and the initial idea was to share my profits thorugh the token (something which has worked tremedously well so far).
But what If I wanted (we want to) be something more in the future? I still don't know... but just in case... I wanted to be ready for that and start preparing the required infrastructures for that.
Expansion cannot happen with liquidity... because those liquidity will always help us to discover our 'real value' (even if we're still pegged on the downside).
Again I'm raving a bit too much... or not, dunno. Thx for the conversation @edje. Since these kind of deep questions allows me to realise in what stage we are and where I want to conduct this business/idea
Your welcome 🙇
Now I think I already mentioned this to you over at TG some time ago. Qredo (https://www.qredo.com/) is building a service to be used by fund managers. They build workflows around DeFi in which multiple peeps need to sign for a transaction before the transaction actually happens. This goes way beyond what you mentioned above, but since you look into the future, a service like Qredo may help to decentralise fund management. Not sure, but this service may also be interesting (though I don't believe in the MC valuation of 1B$, way too big imho): https://www.sandclock.org/ (you need to watch the not so good YT or read through the preso link, I didnt discover any real doc-section). Lithium Finance is coming out with interesting services (https://lith.finance/#Usage)... Essentially a service that allows for difficult to value assets to get a valuation. Can you imagine at some point in time SEED fund offering the market the ability to get SEED taking a stake in a rare asset that is prices through Lithium?