Chris Kim

Chris Kim is a digital asset trading and market infrastructure executive with experience in cryptocurrency trading, market making, arbitrage, and hedge fund operations. He is the CEO and co-founder of Axis and a co-founder and partner at Alphanonce, having previously worked at QCP Capital.

Career

Kim served as an Administrative Clerk in the Singapore Armed Forces from 2011 to May 2013, where he worked on procurement, inventory management, and internal audits. From 2017 to 2019, he worked at QCP Capital in Singapore as Infrastructure Lead and was the firm's first employee. His work involved infrastructure development for a multi-currency spot and derivatives trading desk, with activities including arbitrage and market making. In 2019, Kim co-founded Alphanonce, a cryptocurrency hedge fund focused on market-neutral strategies, market making, and discretionary trading, where he serves as a partner. In January 2025, he co-founded Axis and became its CEO. He leads the company's strategic direction and oversees its investment strategy, focusing on market infrastructure, cross-asset liquidity, and capital efficiency for financial technology businesses.

Interviews

DeFi Citadel Securities

In a September 2026 interview on The Edge Podcast, Kim discussed how his experience in commodities, foreign exchange, and cryptocurrency arbitrage shaped Axis as a cross-asset liquidity provider. He explained that Axis Prime served fintech companies, brokerages, and remittance providers by aggregating fragmented liquidity and supporting asset conversions and flexible settlement without requiring clients to maintain large pre-funded balances. Axis also used capital raised through decentralized finance products such as USDx and sUSDx to fund arbitrage and market-making activities, with returns distributed to stakers. Kim reported that Origin Vault had recently generated a yield of approximately 11% and discussed how staking could increase returns. He described Axis's focus on providing settlement liquidity rather than speculative exposure and outlined its approach to balancing transparency with protecting trading strategies through third-party attestations, liquid reserves, and continuous risk monitoring. Looking ahead, Kim said cryptocurrency markets had likely reached a bottom, while acknowledging the possibility of further corrections, and identified potential opportunities from price differences across tokenized assets, exchanges, and blockchain networks. 

Market-Neutral Strategies

In a December 2025 interview on the Crypto Hipster podcast, Kim discussed his background in institutional cryptocurrency trading and the development of USDx, a synthetic dollar designed to provide onchain access to market-neutral trading strategies. He explained that Axis used automated, low-latency arbitrage to capture price differences across exchanges and regions, with cryptographic verification and AI tools supporting trade monitoring and risk management. Kim argued these strategies could reduce inefficiencies across fragmented markets and generate measurable returns compared with token incentive programs or rehypothecation. He also discussed the need for greater transparency in token issuance and recommended evaluating digital asset treasury companies on a case-by-case basis. The conversation covered staking as a way to earn passive income through regulated services or decentralized finance platforms. Kim said Axis raised $5 million and plans to launch public vaults in early January 2026, with access intended for users worldwide.