Taranveer Singh Sabharwal / STIX — Investor Documentary Record

Taranveer Singh Sabharwal, known as Taran¹⁶, is a Cambridge physics graduate, and committee member of the Cambridge Blockchain Society¹⁷. He identified a specific problem in the crypto market: trading in locked or illiquid tokens was fragmented, conducted through informal back-channel deals, with no standard pricing or process. His stated solution was STIX¹⁸ — a professional over-the-counter marketplace for these transactions.

The concept addressed a genuine market need at the time. As token vesting schedules became longer and larger amounts of capital remained locked, founders, employees, venture investors and funds increasingly sought liquidity before tokens became freely transferable.¹⁹ Secondary transactions were becoming an established part of the digital asset ecosystem, yet they remained largely relationship-driven and opaque.²⁰ A professional marketplace for these transactions was, on its face, a credible and commercially attractive proposition.²¹

Before the BVI company, Taran was sole director and 75%+ owner of SST DIGITAL LTD (formerly SOCRATIX LTD), UK 13899775. Incorporated 8 February 2022. Renamed from SOCRATIX LTD on 15 April 2023 — four days before Socratix Holdings Limited was registered in the BVI (19 April 2023). It was not voluntarily closed. Companies House first gazetted it for compulsory strike-off on 28 January 2025, suspended that action on 14 March 2025, then dissolved it on 22 April 2025. It is his only UK directorship.⁶⁷

STIX is the commercial brand. The SAFE counterparty is Socratix Holdings Limited (BVI Co. 2122340), registered 19 April 2023.²² The live STIX website attributes the brand to Secondary Global Inc, “an entity incorporated in Panama.”²⁴ Investment contracts define "the Business" narrowly: the conducting of secondary-market over-the-counter cryptocurrency and virtual-asset transactions.²³

STIX GLOBAL sp. z o.o. (KRS 0001036546) is an active Polish company, registered 18 May 2023, Warsaw. Public KRS records name Taranveer Singh Sabharwal as president and Socratix Holdings Limited as 100% shareholder. It appeared on Poland’s old virtual-currency register (RDWW-776). That listing is not an EU MiCA licence and does not authorise crypto activity. Poland currently has no firms on the EU CASP register.⁶⁸

Taran founded and led the company throughout the period covered by this website. He is referred to as Taran throughout; Socratix and STIX are used interchangeably to refer to the company, consistent with how the company refers to itself in its own materials.²⁴

STIX presented itself, throughout the period covered by this website, as a staffed operating company rather than a solo venture. Its public team page and LinkedIn materials identified named personnel across institutional sales, compliance, operations, engineering, and product - including Alex Siu²⁵, Jeff Lavoie, CFA²⁶, Vivek Prasad²⁷, Will Clemente²⁸ and Soeleen Kaur²⁹. In October 2024, Taran told Investor 1 directly that the business no longer depended on him personally: "Alex, Jeff and Vivek literally run the business without me," adding that key-man risk was "mostly gone."

This detail becomes relevant later. Once investor communications stopped, the company was not, on this record, short-staffed or without active personnel — a fact that bears on how any subsequent silence toward investors should be read.

THE STORY

Q2 2023: $2.7M seed round. Big Brain, Eterna Capital, Fisher8, TLF, Humla Ventures come in alongside.³⁰ At least eight investors invested in Socratix Holdings Limited through SAFE agreements during the seed round.³¹ Investor 1 invested US$500,000 through a SAFE at a US$18 million post-money valuation cap. Days later, Investor 2 invested US$100,000 on the same terms. The Investor 1 SAFE included on this website is a representative executed agreement from the seed financing. All of the SAFEs provided for automatic conversion only if the company later completed a priced financing raising at least US$5 million.¹¹

Investor 1 signed the SAFE on 2 May 2023. The same day, Taran signed a side letter containing additional commitments regarding future activities and conflicts of interest.³²

THE PROMISE

Before taking the money, Taran signed a personal side letter with the lead investor. 2 May 2023. In it, he personally undertook: "not to carry on the Business unless such Business is conducted through the Company or a 100% direct or indirect subsidiary entity of the Company." The Business was defined as "the business of conducting secondary market over-the-counter cryptocurrency and virtual asset transactions." Not a company promise. His name. His signature.³²

By August 2023, the team was real and growing. Jeff Lavoie joined as Head of BD — "psyched to have him on, really well connected in the US." ³³Days later, asked for a quarterly update, Taran reported a team of eight: CEO, Head of Legal & Compliance, Head of Business Development, Senior Associate, Senior Product Engineer, Senior Frontend Engineer, Frontend Engineer, DevOps Engineer.³⁴ A real company, with a real org chart. That's part of what made the later silence so hard to square — this wasn't a one-man shop that could plausibly go quiet because the founder got overwhelmed.

Throughout 2024, numbers were reported as growing. Investors were kept updated. No formal financials were ever shared. The last investor report they'd ever receive was the Q4 2023 report, published 29 January 2024. ³⁵No financial statements. No revenue figures. No balance sheet. Market commentary, dressed up as an update. Nobody was asking hard questions yet.

Except someone already was. Three months after the seed closed — 27 July 2023 —Investor 1 confronted Taran directly: "this is the ninth time in the past three weeks that you have promised to call me and blown me off. That is both terribly unprofessional on your part and even more disrespectful to me, both as an individual and considering that I am the managing partner of your lead investor."³⁶

Investor 1 traced his concerns to discussions surrounding the proposed investment fund and information from another source, noting that the concerns later extended to possible SPV-related issues.³⁷

Side vehicles. Undisclosed SPVs. The whole pattern this page documents — visible within ninety days of the money landing.

On 17 January 2024, another SAFE was executed at a US$35 million valuation cap.³⁸ More than 90% higher than the cap the first two investors got, eight months earlier, for the identical instrument and identical conversion terms.³⁹

Throughout 2024, Taran remained in regular contact with investors.⁴⁰ Updates were reported as positive, and STIX maintained an active public presence⁴¹ — press appearances, podcast interviews⁴², and frequent posts on Twitter. No formal financial statements were shared during this period, but investors had, on this record, no immediate cause to press the point.

In the fourth quarter of 2024, Taran circulated a Series A deck to investors — the last formal document they would receive.⁴³It disclosed, for the first time, a planned STIX Asset Management arm: a structure exceeding $50 million in AUM, with deal-specific SPVs, a multi-strategy fund, and a proprietary trading desk, operating under the same brand as the OTC platform investors had funded.

Investor 1 raised the conflict directly at this time — running an investment fund alongside a client-facing brokerage, under one name, using the same relationships and deal flow. Taran acknowledged the concern. The plan proceeded regardless.⁴⁴

On 6 February 2025, Taran told Investor 2: "Our company is doing very well! We're just closing our A at 100m, 5x+ from the seed."⁴⁵ What closed on 15 March 2025 was, on its face, a further SAFE instrument — not a certificate of issued shares. Whether that financing met the contractual definition of an Equity Financing cannot be resolved from the document alone.⁴⁶

By late 2024, the fund described in the Series A deck was already operating. In private Telegram messages exchanged with Investor 2 on 25 October 2024, Taran said it had raised approximately $4 million toward a $5 million target, with 30 percent carry and no management fee.⁴⁷Asked how STIX clients viewed the fund, he said "they all love it." Asked whether STIX's own clients were aware of the fund, he replied: "None."

He described the fund's purpose directly: "an experimental vehicle to operate as a principal buyer of secondaries," with a projected cashflow of "5+m per month." ⁴⁸He disclosed, informally, that STIX had generated $1.3 million in transaction fee revenue and $500,000 in OTC trading revenue — figures that had not appeared in any report to investors.⁴⁹ Asked whether the fund's assets sat on STIX's own balance sheet, he replied:⁵⁰

"Yes. The company you invested in lol."

TARAN, TELEGRAM, REPLYING TO INVESTOR 2, WHO ASKED WHETHER FUND ASSETS SAT ON THE COMPANY'S OWN BALANCE SHEET — 25 OCTOBER 2024⁵⁰EXHIBIT 10 · · VIEW ORIGINAL TELEGRAM

In a Telegram conversation with Investor 2 on 25 October 2024, Taran acknowledged that he had recognized the conflict of interest more than a year earlier, stating: "We initially thought of the conflict last July. And decided not to do it. That was a mistake."⁵¹

Asked by Investor 2 whether operating a fund alongside a client-facing brokerage would "get weird at any point," Taran replied that it would not: "Sellers love that we're also now buyers."⁵² He went on to explain that the fund traded as principal against the same order flow STIX brokered for clients: "If we predict someone's gonna buy something at 1.3x in 3 months and it's available rn for 0.8x, we are happy with the duration risk."⁵³ When Investor 2 compared the arrangement to Arthur Hayes's conduct at BitMEX, Taran replied:

STIX and Accomplice led Neutrl’s US$5 million seed in April 2025.⁵⁵ Neutrl’s own risk disclosure names CAVERNA AUCTUS INC. as the sole issuer of NUSD.⁷² In August 2026 Neutrl paused NUSD minting and redemptions over an undisclosed reserve issue.⁷³ Later reporting put liquid assets at about $27 million against a previously cited ~$137 million collateral book.⁷⁴ A ~$3.5 million Curve LP withdrawal by a team wallet minutes before the freeze has been alleged; it is not proven.⁷⁵ Pause coverage generally does not name Taran. STIX appears as the 2025 seed lead. A pre-pause risk note described Neutrl as having concentrated counterparty exposure to STIX as the OTC venue for discounted venture-locked tokens.⁷⁶ STIX investors were not informed that fund capital was being deployed into these investments, nor were they provided with updates regarding the fund's activities.

Neutrl’s founder, Behrin Naidoo, previously co-founded Fyde Treasury. Fyde’s December 2023 $3.2 million seed was led by OP Crypto Ventures (later Inception Capital), where Sabharwal had been Head of DeFi Research. Naidoo publicly said Fyde co-hosted an EthCC Paris 2023 event with STIX and OP Crypto; Sabharwal commented on that post. A third-party directory lists him as a Fyde advisor. Big Brain Holdings appears on both Fyde’s seed and STIX’s $2.7 million seed. Fyde’s TRSY vault is still listed on DefiLlama at low six-figure TVL. No source opened for this page describes Fyde as a rug, hack, or official unwind.⁷⁷

The fund also recorded investments in Ethena Labs⁵⁶, Spectral Labs, Space and Time, Capx AI, and the Shiba Inu ecosystem via Treats for Shib.⁵⁷ These deployments appear to have occurred through a vehicle outside Socratix Holdings Limited, with no disclosure to the investors who had funded the parent company — a fact that bears directly on the side letter discussed earlier.

A STIX team member separately described Neutrl, a recipient of the fund's capital, as "a growing client of STIX's on the buy side" in a public thread, while disclosing his own personal position in the same token.⁵⁸

Throughout this same period, Taran maintained a visible personal investment profile. He stated he had invested over $20 million in Quantinuum, describing it as "my largest single investment" and,⁵⁹

separately, as "my largest private stock holding after anthropic." He said he was "up 300x" on a position in Anthropic.⁶⁰

Weeks earlier, mid-way through the silence with his own investors: "Selling anthropic (250x). Buying x (predicting 5 to 25x).⁶¹

He proposed pooling US$50 million among contacts to acquire hypercars, offering to personally contribute US$10–15 million.⁶²

While STIX investors have received no financials, Socratix Holdings Limited is a named selling stockholder in a US SEC resale prospectus: 430,051 shares and warrants of Predictive Oncology (later Axe Compute; ticker POAI, then AGPU). Footnote 15 lists the holder’s address as 146 Al Maghzi Street, Umm Seqeuim 2, Dubai, UAE. The resale registration was effective 24 November 2025.⁶⁹

Separately, Taranveer Singh Sabharwal — in his own name, not Socratix — is a named selling stockholder of IP Strategy (Nasdaq: IPST, formerly Heritage Distilling / CASK). A 2 June 2026 S-3 lists 41,370 shares/warrants offered for resale (37,285 beneficial, 4.99% blocker).⁷⁰

In July 2026, MVMT Labs, Inc. filed Chapter 11 in Delaware (case 26-11113). The debtor is MVMT Labs, not Sabharwal. Court papers list TSS Digital FZCO, with Taranveer Sabharwal’s name, as a creditor. The claim amount has not been published.⁷¹

On 14 June 2026, posted publicly that "lawsuits are at an ATH in crypto" and that founders were "rugging left right and centre." The observation came from the same person who, by that date, had gone roughly eleven months without answering his own lead investor, and had provided no financial reporting to his investors at any point in the preceding year.⁶³

Taken together, the pattern described in this page — an undisclosed side fund, personal investments across quantum computing and AI, a proposed hypercar pool, all funded or maintained during a period of total silence toward the company's own investors — resembles something closer to a personal investment operation, financed in part by capital raised for an OTC brokerage, than a startup that simply stopped communicating.

Investor communication did not end overnight. It deteriorated gradually.

Throughout 2025 and into 2026, investors across the group repeatedly attempted to obtain basic information about the company they had funded. Emails were sent. Calls were requested. Telegram messages continued. On several occasions, Taran responded. What never arrived were the promised documents, financial information or substantive updates regarding the business itself.

On 25 July 2025, after nearly a year without a meaningful update, Investor 1 again asked Taran for information.

Hours later, Taran sent a Telegram message saying that he had travelled to India because of a family emergency and would follow up “this weekend.” No substantive follow-up was provided.

On 9 November 2025, Investor 1 wrote again, describing the continuing lack of engagement as “completely irresponsible, unprofessional and disrespectful.” Again, no response addressed the underlying issues.

On 23 November 2025, Investor 1 referred back to an earlier message in which Taran had said he would never forget his day-one investors and asked:

“What happened to that sentiment?”

INVESTOR 1, EMAIL TO TARAN — 23 NOVEMBER 2025 ⁸

On 16 February 2026, another email followed, noting that even “the courtesy of a reply would be appreciated”—four months on. There was no substantive reply.⁸

Then, after roughly eleven months without meaningful contact, Taran messaged Investor 1 on 28 March 2026 to ask how he was doing. The message did not contain a business update, financial information or an explanation for the prolonged lack of communication. Investor 1 replied directly, saying he understood why Taran was suddenly back in touch after almost a year of silence toward his own investors.⁹

Taran's response consisted of three brief messages, ending with:

“What a terrible message to send. All the best…”

Investor 1's final reply stated that the investors would now proceed together as a group.⁹

By early 2026, the pattern extended beyond a single investor. Investors across the group had sent emails, requested calls and asked for basic reporting. Some outreach was acknowledged. Meetings, documents and future updates were promised. None resolved the underlying questions.⁸ No investor contributing to this website had seen Taran in person for an extended period, despite multiple agreed meetings in Dubai with Investor 1. Investor 2 visited business addresses publicly associated with STIX in Dubai. Those premises appeared vacated. The address Socratix itself gave the SEC is 146 Al Maghzi Street, Umm Seqeuim 2, Dubai, UAE. Neither STIX nor Taran has identified a new office.⁶⁴

Investor 3 has raised separate concerns regarding the possible ownership structure of certain assets. Those matters remain under investigation.⁶⁵

Shortly afterwards, the STIX platform displayed only an “Under Maintenance” page. No explanation was published. No timeline was provided. No message was issued to investors or clients.⁶⁶