Prominent Investor Thinks Unusual Crypto Funding Is A Big Deal

By Kapil Gauhar

Crypto industry has got an unusual amount of funding from the investors this year. And a prominent investor thinks it as a big deal.

An early stage investor with Coinbase and Instacart in his portfolio, Garry Tan commented on the growing amount of institutional money that’s flowing into crypto-funds. He said that he is very focused at the FUD this old-school-new-school alliance is getting from the core crypto believers.

Encouraging that the mainstream investors were not putting in small money, Tan told the funding equates investments which are set by venture capitalists.

He added, “Is it a negligible amount? No!”

Crypto funds have risen as an alternative to financial specialists who prefer to put in more capitals into the cryptocurrencies than average retail investors. However, the fund works like a traditional hedge fund, but the contrasts itself by including cryptocurrencies to its portfolio. These funds carry their own lower cap of investments. So, big investors pour-in big money into a pool of funds and then leave it under the scrutiny of professional hedge custodians with the hopes of growth.

The latest example that explains the popularity of crypto funds among mainstream investors comes from Yale University. A prominent caretaker of $29.4 million endowment fund of the university, David Swensen had recently taken $400 million worth of positions in two portfolios committed to cryptocurrencies. A fund co-launched by Coinbase, Paradigm manages one of the funds.

Core crypto believers consider that crypto funds are institutionalising Bitcoin. The principle of the blockchain that is the distributed ownership of validation, trust and security, goes against the workings of centralised custodianships. Blockchain lets users take complete hold of their wealth by keeping a private key. In the case of crypto funds, managers need control to the investors’ virtual assets by gaining access to their private keys.

A February 2018 study titled “Rise of the Crypto Hedge Fund” by Stanford University writes:

“The safeguarding of private keys is the utmost security concern for fund managers, and any dissemination of those keys—including to third-party custodians—will only serve to increase the risk of theft. The more people have access to keys, and the more computers or servers on which those keys can be found, the more likely that those keys can be hacked or misappropriated.”

Tan pointed out that he comprehends the internal risks in making the bets in the market that is hyper-volatile by nature. According to a report from Autonomous Next, Crypto funds have faced more than 50% loss in the midst of an overall bearish market trend already. Nonetheless, institutional money keeps on coming inside this new industry.