Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund Wagers To Bring In Popular Investors To Cryptocurrency
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund gambles that institutional investors will in no time be making an impact on crypto assets.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm has made an early-stage investment in Tagomi, a startup that seeks to operate as a broker-dealer for a family office, rich people, and other institutional investors.
The startup which is still at its initial stage was co-founded by Greg Tusar, a former Goldman Sachs executive who operated the firm’s electronic division.
It is reported that Tagomi raised $15.5 million and it uncertain how much of that fund comes from Founders Fund. But directors in a recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, Napoleon Ta, a Founders Fund partner, is considered as one of the firm’s directors.
The firm hopes to take advantage of the disintegration of the cryptocurrency spot market by creating trading tools that automatically rout large transactions through dozen exchanges including over-the-counter (OTC) trading platforms known as dark pools.
Founders Fund had previously invested in the promising crypto asset industry.
With an estimated $3 billion under management, the firm earlier on mentioned that it had directly invested in bitcoin but much details were not given. Based on reports, it had gathered hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin.
Thiel, who also co-founded PayPal, is a forthright libertarian and a passionate believer in bitcoin’s potential to become “digital gold.”
“I would be long bitcoin, and neutral to skeptical of just about everything else at this point with a few possible exceptions. There will be one online equivalent to gold, and the one you’d bet on would be the biggest,” Thiel said in March in an interview hosted by the Economic Club of New York.
Including it a direct investment in bitcoin, Founders Fund had experimented in the industry indirectly by supporting cryptocurrency hedge funds Polychain Capital and Metastable Capital. The firm has also invested in Harbor, a platform that permits users to tokenize real-world assets while it sticks with securities regulations.
