He managed institutional crypto positions on spreadsheets and assumptions, then watched the market blow up. Now he is trying to rebuild the plumbing so it can't happen the same way twice.
In November 2022, the crypto market had its worst week in years. FTX, one of the largest exchanges on earth, went from titan to bankruptcy in a matter of days. Confidence drained out of the whole industry. That same week, Alexandre Elkrief closed his first fundraising round. Most founders would have paused, softened the pitch, waited for the smoke to clear. He did the opposite. He pointed at the smoke and said: this is exactly why we exist.
Elkrief is the co-founder and co-CEO of August, a New York company that most people outside institutional crypto have never heard of - which is roughly how he wanted it. August is an on-chain prime brokerage. In plain terms, it is the machinery that lets serious money trade, borrow, lend, and settle digital assets with the kind of risk controls a bank would recognize. It is not a token to speculate on. It is closer to a clearing house or a set of rails. Boring, in the way that load-bearing things are boring.
That instinct - to build the unglamorous middle layer rather than the shiny front end - runs through his whole story. To understand why he was so calm the week FTX fell, you have to go back to where he learned what breaks.
Before August there was a hedge fund. Elkrief spent the 2020-2022 cycle as a portfolio manager at LedgerPrime, a quantitative crypto fund in New York, running institutional positions across decentralized finance during the stretch the industry nicknamed DeFi Summer. From the outside it looked like a party - yields everywhere, new protocols daily, money moving fast. From his seat it looked like something more precarious.
What he saw was that even the sophisticated players were flying blind. Strategies that moved millions of dollars were, in his words, running on "spreadsheets and assumptions." There was no shared risk tooling, no reliable way to see counterparty exposure, no transparency you could actually audit. The plumbing simply did not exist. When the market was going up, nobody cared. When it turned, the lack of visibility is what turned losses into collapses.
Elkrief's path to that desk was not the standard crypto-native one. He had done a stint at Deutsche Bank, a legacy institution with all the risk apparatus DeFi lacked. He had also co-founded a startup called Knowhere, a digital news platform built to strip bias out of reporting - a very different problem, but the same underlying reflex: take a system people distrust and try to make it verifiable. He studied at Stanford. By the time he was managing DeFi books, he had already seen how grown-up finance handles risk and how the internet handles trust. Watching crypto ignore both was, for him, less shocking than instructive.
He and his co-founder, Aya Kantorovich, started building in 2022. The company was called Fractal then; it would later become August. The idea was direct: if the thing that killed FTX and Three Arrows Capital was hidden risk and unmanageable counterparty exposure, then build the layer where risk is visible by default and the guarantees live in the code, not in a handshake.
Their timing was either terrible or perfect, depending on how you read it. They began fundraising just as FTX started to wobble and closed the round the same week it imploded. Investors were, understandably, in no mood to fund crypto. But the whole premise of the company had just been proven live, on the front page. The disaster wasn't a reason to walk away from the pitch. It was the pitch.
Dragonfly Capital's Rob Hadick, whose firm would later lead August's Series A, put the thesis in the same terms Elkrief did: FTX and 3AC "didn't fail due to a lack of institutional interest in digital assets. They failed because risk was obfuscated, and counterparty exposure was unmanageable." The bet behind August is that institutions never actually left crypto. They were just waiting for infrastructure they could trust.
What August actually does is compress a sprawling, fragmented market into something a single institution can hold in one hand. Through one on-chain account, a client can reach across more than 12 blockchains, 250 tokens, and 70 protocols. Staked assets and yield-bearing positions can be used as collateral for structured products, OTC derivatives, and credit. Positions can be cross-margined. A DeFi portfolio can be hedged with centralized-finance rails without leaving the account. Every piece of it is auditable on-chain.
The visible part of all this, for most people, is Upshift - the first application built on top of August. Upshift is an institutional DeFi yield protocol, a set of smart-contract vaults holding roughly $300 million. It looks friendly. It is a savings-account-shaped thing that a fintech or an asset manager can plug into. Elkrief is clear-eyed about why that matters.
The yield product is not the point. It is the friendly-looking thing that gets a treasurer to click the button. Everything real - the settlement, the collateral management, the risk engine - happens after the click, down in August. Upshift is the horse. August is the city.
Ask Elkrief where this goes and he reaches for a comparison that sounds grander than the buttoned-up product suggests: he wants August to be the BlackRock of DeFi. Not in the sense of managing everyone's money, but in the sense of being the default trust layer - the place institutional capital flows through because the risk is legible and the accounting is built into the infrastructure itself. In his framing, trust should come from code and auditability, not from a promise on a pitch deck.
There is a deliberate quietness to how the company has grown. August crossed $7 billion in monthly volume and originated more than $400 million in loans before most of the market registered that it existed. When it finally raised its $10 million Series A in March 2025 - led by Dragonfly, with 6th Man Ventures, Foresight, SCB, FinTech Collective, Robot Ventures, and Maven11 alongside - the press release almost bragged about the invisibility: the company had "quietly" hit those numbers, it said, proof that institutions never left. Building in the quiet was a strategy, not an accident. Infrastructure earns trust by working, not by announcing itself.
Step back from the crypto vocabulary and Elkrief's career reads as one repeated move. A news startup that tried to make reporting less biased. A bank that took risk seriously. A hedge-fund desk where he watched what happens when nobody can see the exposure. And now a company whose entire premise is that you shouldn't have to trust a counterparty - you should be able to check. The consistent instinct is to take a system people are right to distrust and make it auditable.
He and Kantorovich run August as co-CEOs, an arrangement that only works when two people share one thesis tightly enough to finish each other's sentences. Theirs is short: put the risk controls in the infrastructure, not in the trust between counterparties. It is not a slogan you'd chant. It is the kind of idea that, if it's right, quietly becomes the thing everyone uses and nobody notices - which, for a man who reads a market collapse as a product spec, might be the whole point.