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“Bitcoin’s been around long enough now where people are more familiar with it,” said Keld van Schreven, a director at the London-based firm, adding: The year’s price gains might entice big institutional investors like pension funds and endowments, struggling to hit return targets so they can meet obligations to retirees and other beneficiaries, according to executives at the cryptocurrency-focused investment firm KR1.
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“We’re getting interest from significant institutional investors of all types.” “There’s a lot of drama around it all, there’s a lot of energy, there’s a lot of press,” Brodsky said. Related: Flaws in LocalBitcoins Data Call Into Question Regional Adoption Claims As word trickled out, a number of investors who had never touched the asset class contacted the firm requesting invites, said Paul Brodsky, a partner at Pantera. Pantera Capital, one of the earliest cryptocurrency funds, recently scheduled an event in San Francisco for its existing investors featuring cryptographer and digital currency pioneer Nick Szabo. It’s just a made-up thing, as they say, with a volatile price that only derives from what the next buyer is willing to pay.īut with the global economy slowing and trillions of dollars of government bonds from Europe and Japan trading with negative yields, bitcoin’s price gains this year could conceivably attract a new wave of investors who previously wouldn’t even take a look.Īlready there are signs they are. On Wall Street, one of the chief criticisms of bitcoin is that it was invented only a decade ago (a baby by old-world standards) by a computer programmer (or programmers, nobody really knows), with no real fundamental, underlying value. Investors who bought on the last day of 2018 would have doubled their money, and then some. And bitcoin? Prices for the cryptocurrency finished the third quarter around $8,308 each, according to data provider Messari, up 114 percent on the year.