Citrini has become a research name watched by both traditional finance and parts of the crypto market. In February, its report The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis helped intensify the sell-off in U.S. software stocks and amplified fears around job losses in Silicon Valley. In April, Citrini’s Analyst#3 traveled to the Hormuz Strait and wrote a field report that used direct observations to clarify how the key conflict chokepoint actually operates. More recently, Citrini semiconductor analyst Jukan accurately identified the importance of copper foil in the AI and semiconductor industries, helping drive another round of investment interest around that theme.
For crypto market participants, one of the earlier moments that put Citrini on the radar came in May, shortly before the listing of Cerebras (CBRS). Citrini posted that fund managers were using Trade.xyz, a platform in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, to conduct early price discovery. The post was then reposted and confirmed by Trade.xyz founder Shokun. Because Citrini had already gained influence in traditional finance through The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, its recognition of Trade.xyz and pre-market U.S. stock pricing brought more attention to RWA platforms, pre-market U.S. equity contract platforms and on-chain U.S. stock trading platforms.
That endorsement also contributed to the spread of this year’s “U.S. stock RWA asset” narrative. In that sense, Citrini served as a signal from the crypto side to traditional finance: crypto-native players that once looked peripheral to mainstream markets were now aiming at areas such as U.S. equity trading, pre-market pricing and on-chain financial infrastructure. The founder behind Citrini is James van Geelen, a proponent of second-order thinking and long-termism.
Geelen, now 33, did not come from a conventional finance background. Public information shows that he graduated from UCLA with dual degrees in biology and psychology. He also worked in downtown Los Angeles as an emergency medical technician and paramedic. Those experiences shaped his preference for efficiency and planning. As he once put it: “If you don’t have a plan, you’re gonna have a bad time.” He has also described himself as a “genius musician,” despite not having widely recognized work to show for it.
His original path would have led him toward becoming a doctor, but he instead moved into entrepreneurship. He first founded a healthcare company and sold it to a private equity fund, which allowed him to step outside the usual route of elite university, employment and corporate management. He later founded Citrini. In a 2023 appearance on the Odd Lots podcast, he also said he had co-founded one of the earliest medical cannabis dispensaries in Connecticut. These experiences formed the cross-disciplinary background that preceded his entry into investment research.
In 2018, after securing some starting capital, Geelen began his personal investing career under the name Citrinitas Capital. He captured early opportunities in AI, including Nvidia, and in GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, including Ozempic and Wegovy. According to PitchBook, Citrini completed a seed financing round of about $5.05 million in December 2025. The firm has around 10 employees and remains privately held.
The report that pushed Citrini into broader market debate arrived in February, when Geelen and Alap Shah, who came from traditional finance, co-authored The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. They repeatedly stressed that the report was a “thought experiment” and a scenario exercise rather than a prediction. Even so, its discussion of mass white-collar unemployment, falling consumer spending and economic contraction, described as “Ghost GDP,” triggered concern across capital markets. Delivery, payment and software stocks came under heavy pressure.
IBM recorded its largest single-day drop of 2025 on February 23. American Express and Blackstone both fell more than 8%. The broader software sector declined nearly 5%. DoorDash, Uber, Mastercard, Visa, Capital One and Apollo Global Management Inc. at one point fell 3%. Multiple U.S. equity sectors were pulled into the sell-off, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average at one point dropped more than 800 points. Shah later publicly described the team’s investment posture as “shorting and going long”: shorting companies they believed would be disrupted by AI while holding semiconductor technology stocks that benefit from AI. The report drew follow-up coverage from overseas media including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal.
Citrini’s research range is not limited to AI and equities. On April 6, the firm’s Analyst#3 went to the Hormuz Strait, a key location in the U.S.-Iran conflict, and reported a series of field observations. The report described the operating model of Iran’s “toll station” in the strait and presented several counterintuitive conclusions: shipping volume through the strait would gradually rise regardless of how the situation developed; Iran did not want to close the Hormuz Strait; traffic order in the strait was in fact highly standardized; even if ground operations began, shipping volume would continue to increase; and the conflict was not a simple confrontation between two sides, but a multi-party game and a restructuring of the regional pattern. Geographic disputes within great-power competition also fall within Citrini’s research scope.
When explaining the company name “citrinitas,” Geelen said the inspiration came from George Soros’s The Alchemy of Finance. “It’s actually a stage in alchemy, but what most people don’t know is that in this transitional stage, lead starts turning into gold, but it has not fully become gold yet.” That image matches the point at which he prefers to act: before others notice the change in the lead, he wants to identify the emergence of gold. Based on Citrini’s past content and public information, the firm focuses on long-term “supertrends” such as AI, robotics, energy demand, fiscal policy, geopolitics and modern warfare. It also emphasizes executable investment baskets and tactical macro trading ideas, with a bias toward long-term structural change rather than short-term trading alone.
Citrini frequently uses scenario exercises to help readers understand second- and third-order effects. Geelen has said: “Don’t always think about what you think will happen. Instead, think about the things that must happen. How will the market’s reaction change the real situation? What secondary effects will follow? What are the obstacles that keep a trend going? And where will capital flow in order to overcome those obstacles?” He bought overnight financing rate call options during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in March 2023 and gained nearly 50 times on that trade. Last December, before the United States launched military action in Venezuela, he also shared views on investment opportunities in Venezuelan sovereign bonds.
This year, Citrini has brought in several independent analysts, including macro analyst Nick Reece, Korean semiconductor industry analyst @jukan05 and AI chip industry analyst @zephyr_z9. Their additions help strengthen the firm’s coverage of industrial details, technical processes and industry direction. At present, Citrini still operates with a founder-driven model combined with collaboration from an anonymous elite research team.