Hong Kim

Hong Kim is co-founder, Chief Technology Officer, and a board director of Bitwise Asset Management. Bitwise says it was founded in 2017 and focuses exclusively on crypto investing, indexing, and research; Bitcoin Magazine reports that Kim and Hunter Horsley incorporated Bitwise at the end of 2016 while working from a living room in San Francisco.

Kim has served as CTO since Bitwise’s inception. SEC filings describe his pre-Bitwise background as cybersecurity work for the South Korean Military, later work on Google Drive backend infrastructure, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Bitwise’s index methodology says he leads the engineering team and researches technological developments native to crypto protocols.

Bitwise has grown from an early crypto index-fund company into a global crypto asset manager offering ETFs, ETPs, separately managed accounts, private funds, hedge fund strategies, and staking. The firm’s public materials say it serves thousands of financial advisors, RIAs, family offices, institutional investors, and broker-dealers from offices including San Francisco, New York, and London.

• Kim’s public work is centered on making crypto usable through regulated, institutionally acceptable wrappers without abandoning the technical and cultural principles of public blockchains.
• Bitwise’s stated client filter is: “What would the client want?”
• Kim has emphasized Bitcoin transparency and stewardship, including Bitwise publishing Bitcoin ETF wallet addresses and donating a portion of ETF profits to Bitcoin open-source developers.
• In Bitcoin Magazine, Kim framed Bitwise’s mission as helping “accelerate and guide this movement” toward “public money that everyone can access and that nobody controls.”
• His technical focus includes institutional-grade staking, protocol research, open-source contribution, and infrastructure reliability, reflected in Bitwise Onchain Solutions and the 2026 Chorus One acquisition.
• No publicly verified personal angel check size, personal fund, or repeatable personal angel-investing criteria were found in accessible sources.