Bitcoin August 9, 2018 Daily Hodl Staff

$700 Million Crypto Hedge Fund Says Investors Are Sleeping on ‘Profound’ Bitcoin Game Changer

One of the largest cryptocurrency hedge funds with more than $700 million in assets under management says crypto investors are sleeping on the biggest news of the year.

Pantera CEO Dan Morehead told CNBC that news of the New York Stock Exchange owner teaming up with Microsoft and Starbucks to launch a new crypto futures contract and retail ecosystem for digital assets far outweighs the same old story on Bitcoin ETFs.

“In the last three or four business days, we’ve had two pieces of news. The ETF being rejected for the fifth time. That doesn’t seem like it’s very interesting to me. But on Friday, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, which also owns $42 billion worth of other exchanges, launched a cryptocurrency exchange called Bakkt. That is huge news. The other investors include Pantera, BCG and Microsoft. That is going to be a very profound impact over the next five or ten years for the markets. To my mind, that’s what people should be focused on…

I think the main thing to remember is that Bitcoin is a very early stage venture, but it has a real-time price feed. And that’s a unique thing, and people get really excited about the price and overreact, I think, to announcements. There’s been a couple of big things coming out in the last week, and the ETF rejection is the same story we’ve had for five years. I think the SEC’s been very cautious with an ETF. Bitcoin’s up 82% year-on-year, so it’s still doing really well…

I think it’s going to be quite a long time until an ETF is approved. And here’s the perspective: The last asset class to get approved for ETF certification was copper. Copper has been on earth for 10,000 years and it just got approved in 2012 after a very long multi-year process. I think ETFs and Bitcoin still have quite a ways to go.”

Morehead says he believes that a year from now, the price of Bitcoin will be “much, much higher than it is today.

Pantera first invested in Bitcoin back when the price was just over $100. The company recently released a retrospective on its first bold price prediction for BTC from five years ago.