Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, is revealing that his first dabble in the crypto market was a purchase of 30,000 Bitcoin (BTC), and half a million Ethereum (ETH), both very early in the game.
In an interview with Alex Saunders from Nugget News, the former hedge fund manager and outspoken crypto bull gave the inside scoop on how he first got started in the crypto market.
“A friend of mine asked me about Bitcoin… I did 15 minutes of research and was like ‘Huh, cool technology, libertarians like it. This was in 2012… The Chinese were buying it. I was like ‘It’s going to go higher.’
My first buys of Bitcoin were at about $95. They were very speculative. I bought it because I thought it would go up. And as I started looking at it and digging in, I thought ‘This could be cool.’ So I called up a friend of mine named Dan Morehead from Pantera… I said ‘Morehead, take a look at this, I don’t have enough time,” and after two weeks he called me back said ‘Dude this is going to change the world…’
So we decided… that we would buy a bunch of Bitcoin. And to Dan’s credit, he bought a lot. We were a lot richer than Dan at the time. He bought a lot of Bitcoin, about 30,000 Bitcoin for himself. So we were like ‘We’ll take $30,001,’ because we couldn’t let him have more than we had.”
Novogratz goes on to talk about when he planned to sell his stack of BTC and how his partner stopped him from doing so.
“I actually wanted to sell it at 1,000. That had been my plan – to sell it and buy a jet… My partner [Pete] Briger wouldn’t let me. He was so adamant… He’s like ‘ I’m doing you a favor. This is going to go so much higher. We don’t want to sell it ever.'”
Once Novogratz dove more into the crypto scene, he wasn’t satisfied with just his BTC investment. He also went in hard for Ethereum.
“My first Ether, I actually bought from Vitalik [Buterin]… I met him once at a dinner and he remembered me, but didn’t know me but they thought it was good for the community to have a Wall Street guy buying, so I bought half a million Ether at $99 cents.
He changed the price on me at the last minute from $0.98 to $0.99, because I waited too long and the price went up. And then I really became much more of a crypto maniac.”
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