Austin Barack is a Partner and Senior Research Analyst at CoinFund, working on early stage venture investing and fundamentals based liquid investing. He focuses most closely on scaling and middleware infrastructure, DeFi, NFT financialization, identity, and payments. Austin began his career in fintech as an early employee at cross border payments company Payoneer (NASDAQ: PAYO), before going on to co-found Promeritum, a provider of collateralized lending products. Prior to joining CoinFund, he was the VP of Finance at 21Shares, an exchange traded product issuer focused on digital assets. Austin has been researching, investing, and building in crypto since early 2013. Originally from Connecticut, Austin has lived in Chile, Hungary, and Australia, and speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese. Austin holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.