Taranveer Singh Sabharwal, known as Taran¹⁴, is a Cambridge physics graduate, and committee member of the Cambridge Blockchain Society¹⁵. 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.² His stated solution was STIX¹⁶ — a professional over-the-counter marketplace for these transactions.³

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.¹⁷ Secondary transactions were becoming an established part of the digital asset ecosystem, yet they remained largely relationship-driven and opaque.¹⁸ A professional marketplace for these transactions was, on its face, a credible and commercially attractive proposition.¹⁹

STIX is the commercial brand. The legal entity behind it, and the counterparty on every investment agreement referenced in this website, is Socratix Holdings Limited, a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.²⁰ Investment contracts define "the Business" narrowly: the conducting of secondary-market over-the-counter cryptocurrency and virtual-asset transactions.²¹

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.²²

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 Siu²³, Jeff Lavoie, CFA²⁴, Vivek Prasad²⁵, Will Clemente²⁶ and Soeleen Kaur²⁷. 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.²⁸ At least eight investors invested in Socratix Holdings Limited through SAFE agreements during the seed round.²⁹ 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.³⁰ The agreements included on this website are the executed agreements signed during the seed round.³⁰ All of the SAFEs provided for automatic conversion only if the company later completed a priced financing raising at least US$5 million.³⁰

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.²⁹

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.³⁰

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." ³¹Days 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.³² 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. ³³No 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."³⁴

Investor 1 traced his concerns to discussions surrounding the proposed investment fund involving Ana, an individual involved in discussions relating to the fund structure: "it started around the same time as the issues with the 'fund' creation with Ana (and now the concerns have extended to the SPVs, if what Ana says is true)."³⁵

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.³⁶ More than 90% higher than the cap the first two investors got, eight months earlier, for the identical instrument and identical conversion terms.³⁷

Throughout 2024, Taran remained in regular contact with investors.³⁸ Updates were reported as positive, and STIX maintained an active public presence³⁹ — press appearances, podcast interviews⁴⁰, 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.⁴¹It 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.⁴²

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."⁴³ 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.⁴⁴

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.⁴⁵Asked 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." ⁴⁶He 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.⁴⁷ Asked whether the fund's assets sat on STIX's own balance sheet, he replied:⁴⁸

"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 2024⁴⁸EXHIBIT 10 · · VIEW ORIGINAL TELEGRAM

Taran acknowledged, in the same conversation, that he had recognized the conflict of interest more than a year earlier: "We initially thought of the conflict last July. And decided not to do it. That was a mistake."⁴⁹

Asked directly whether running a fund alongside a client-facing brokerage would "get weird at any point," he said it would not: "Sellers love that we're also now buyers."⁵⁰ He described using the fund to trade 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."⁵¹ When the arrangement was compared to Arthur Hayes's conduct at BitMEX, he replied:

The fund subsequently participated in Neutrl's US$5 million financing round⁵² , a company that publicly appeared closely associated with STIX and Taran. Public materials created the impression that Taran had played a significant role in the company's formation. 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.

and investments in Ethena Labs⁵³, Spectral Labs, Space and Time, Capx AI, and the Shiba Inu ecosystem via Treats for Shib.⁵⁴ 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.⁵⁵

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,⁵⁶

separately, as "my largest private stock holding after anthropic." He said he was "up 300x" on a position in Anthropic.⁵⁷

Weeks earlier, mid-way through the silence with his own investors: "Selling anthropic (250x). Buying x (predicting 5 to 25x).⁵⁸

He proposed pooling US$50 million among contacts to acquire hypercars, offering to personally contribute US$10–15 million.⁵⁹

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.⁶⁰

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, Investor 1 sent a formal letter after nearly a year without a meaningful update.

The letter recorded that Taran had agreed to meet in Dubai but the meeting never took place. It also noted that investors had learned about the STIX fund through media coverage rather than from Taran directly. It concluded:

“Your lead investor is unhappy and has done absolutely nothing to justify such deliberate, long-term isolation.”

INVESTOR 1, FORMAL LETTER TO TARAN — 25 JULY 2025 · EXHIBIT 20 ⁴⁹

Taran did not respond to the letter itself. Hours later, he 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 · EXHIBIT 20 ⁴⁹

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.⁴⁹

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.⁶¹

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.⁶¹

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.⁶² No investor contributing to this site had seen Taran in person for an extended period, despite multiple agreed meetings in Dubai with Investor 1. A Dubai address associated with him was visited by Investor 1 and appeared unoccupied at the time of the visit.⁶³

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.⁶⁴