Billionaire Investor Alan Howard Placing Massive Bet on Bitcoin and Ethereum

Billionaire hedge fund manager Alan Howard is backing One River Digital Asset Management’s $1 billion bet on crypto.

Howard, co-founder of his own Brevan Howard Asset management, is supporting innovative investment manager One River Digital’s plans to continue to plunge further into the cryptoverse.

One River Digital CEO Eric Peters is committing the firm to a $1 billion investment into ETH and BTC by early 2021. The firm already has $600 million invested in cryptocurrencies. It quietly made its purchases in November before BTC hit $16,000 so as not to jolt the market before it could join it.

Howard will support the move both by investing in One River Digital’s crypto funds and by purchasing a partial stake in the business. Additionally, Elwood Asset Management, a company Howard controls, will provide One River Digital with “trading services, market analysis and technical support.”

Peters founded One River Digital in 2013 with a plan to focus on riskier assets with high volatility. He was initially drawn to digital assets because of that inherent volatility and their role in the changing financial landscape.

As interest rates remain at zero and the fed continues to spend to recover from the global economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Peters believes massive inflation and currency debasement are just around the corner. The CEO is confident that those macro factors will catapult Bitcoin and other crypto assets to higher heights in 2021.

“Covid-19 provided the ultimate catalyst for that transition. This is the most interesting macro trade I’ve seen in my career…There definitely are more risks to [Bitcoin] than gold, which has been around for thousands of years, but there’s also way more convexity. There are very few convex bets that’ll help your portfolio when these macro forces start playing out…

There is going to be a generational allocation to this new asset class. The flows have only just begun.”