The following is a guest post and guest post from Thomas Pratter, founder and CEO of Renesis.
Liquid crypto funds are having a moment. The number of actively managed vehicles continues to grow, DeFi strategies are gaining legitimacy, and regulatory clarity is slowly catching up. Institutional allocators are paying more attention than ever.
But behind the optimism lies a less glamorous truth: Most fund managers still run their businesses on duct tape.
The spreadsheet problem
Ask any emerging fund manager how they track their portfolio across five exchanges, three chains and a handful of DeFi protocols. The honest answer is usually a combination of spreadsheets, custom scripts, and a lot of manual tuning.
This is not a technological problem in the traditional sense of the word. The protocols are working. The exchanges have APIs. The data exists. The problem is that no one has connected it all together in a way that makes sense for a fund that manages real capital.
For a CeFi fund trading venue and perpetrators on centralized exchanges, the tooling gap is annoying but manageable. For a fund that executes DeFi strategies and provides liquidity, staking, lending, and yield farming across multiple protocols and chains, it becomes operationally crippling.
Why DeFi makes everything harder
DeFi positions are fundamentally different from centralized currency balances. An LP position on Uniswap is not a number in an account. It is a dynamic multi-asset exposure that incurs costs, changes in composition and can behave very differently depending on market conditions. A renewed position on EigenLayer includes layers of delegation and reward accrual that no traditional portfolio system was built to analyze.
The result is that fund managers with advanced DeFi strategies often cannot answer fundamental questions about their own portfolios without hours of manual work. What is my current NAV? How did this position perform last quarter? What is my actual exposure per protocol, per chain, per strategy?
These are questions that are on the table for every institutional operation. And for too many DeFi native funds, answering them accurately is still a real challenge.
The LP reporting gap
The problem extends beyond internal visibility. Fund managers must report to their LPs. Allocators increasingly expect clean dashboards, auditable performance data and institutional-level analytics. The three-year track records are starting to matter as the funds launching in 2022 reach that milestone.
If you can’t produce a clean Sharpe ratio, good drawdown analysis, or NAV history that explains your DeFi holdings, you’re not just operationally inefficient. You lose credibility with the people writing the checks.
Older portfolio management systems are not designed for this. Most are built for a world where positions live on centralized exchanges and assets have neat ticker symbols. Bolting DeFi to these systems usually means wallet scanning at best, which tells you token balances but nothing about the actual nature of your holdings.
Why AI is the only way to keep up
DeFi moves quickly. New protocols are launched every week. Existing versions upgrade, fork or change their mechanics. Any system that relies on purely manual protocol integration will always fall behind.
This is where AI becomes essential, not as a buzzword, but as a practical necessity. At Renesis, we use AI-powered categorization to automatically identify and classify DeFi holdings at the most granular level. In addition to our 80+ manually mapped protocols, our AI layer ensures that every other protocol a fund interacts with is recognized, categorized and accurately reflected in the portfolio view.
The DeFi landscape is simply too fast-moving and too fragmented for a team of engineers to manually keep track of it. With AI, a small, focused team can cover the entire surface of DeFi without sacrificing depth or accuracy. It’s the way a company with seven employees can provide coverage that traditional providers with teams of 200 employees find difficult to match.
What institutional DeFi infrastructure actually needs
Discussions with dozens of fund managers over the past two years have consistently revealed a number of requirements.
Uniform visibility in CeFi and DeFi. No two dashboards, no spreadsheet combining exports from three different tools. One vision that naturally understands both worlds.
Protocol level intelligence. The system needs to understand what a Pendle yield token is, how an Aave lending position works, and what the funding rates on Hyperliquid look like. Not just that there are tokens in a wallet. This means deep protocol-by-protocol mapping combined with AI categorization to handle the long tail.
LP-focused reporting that looks professional. Configurable dashboards that give allocators the metrics they need without the fund manager having to rebuild them every quarter.
And implementation infrastructure that connects to the same portfolio overview. Managing your portfolio in one system and executing trades in another, without a shared context, should be a thing of the past.
Try it today
This is exactly the problem we built Renesis for. A DeFi-native portfolio management and execution platform for the fund manager trading in both centralized and decentralized locations. It’s fully live, free to sign up for, and already manages real portfolios.
If you manage a liquid fund and spend more time reconciling data than making investment decisions, visit renesis.fi and connect your first wallet or exchange account in minutes. No sales call required, no purchasing cycle. Just log in and view your portfolio as it should look.
The crypto fund landscape is rapidly maturing. The infrastructure must match that ambition.