What Bitcoin u-turns mean for crypto
Cryptocurrency adoption is trending in only one direction – upwards. One way we can see this is through the u-turns of institutions and household name investment legends.
A clear example of this in recent weeks is Blackrock, the CEO of which, Larry Fink, once referred to Bitcoin as “an index for money laundering”.
But two weeks ago, the world’s largest asset manager with $10 trillion in assets under management, partnered with a major crypto exchange to provide its institutional investors with access to digital currencies.
Although that partnership might not be going too swimmingly at the moment, as it is revealed on Wednesday that the US regulator’s charge against a former employee of the crypto exchange in question may not be the only instance of insider trading at the firms, according to a new study and reported by Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, famously got on the Bitcoin bashing bandwagon act a few years back.
He noted: “Bitcoin will not survive… this is my personal opinion, there will be no real, non-controlled currency in the world. There is no government that’s going to put up with it for long… there will be no currency that gets around government controls.”
Now Dimon oversees JP Morgan making strategic steps into digital currencies, creating its own digital coin, opening a bank in the metaverse and buying a stake in a blockchain firm.
Then, of course, there’s Warren Buffett. Known as the Oracle of Omaha, and personally worth $106bn, he is one of the most successful investors of all time, lauded for his insight and savvy.
He is also known for once slamming Bitcoin as “rat poison” and an “unproductive asset”.
Yet earlier this year, his company, Berkshire Hathaway, made its crypto investment public with a SEC filing.
It revealed that Buffett’s firm had purchased $1 billion in shares of Nubank, a digital bank based in Brazil, and the largest of its kind in Latin America. The digital bank’s investment division, allows users to put money in a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).
These are just a few examples of how misguided individual experts and institutions have been on crypto over the last 13 and a half years.
Increasingly, digital currencies are being regarded by Wall Street giants, household name investing legends, leading academic institutions, major multinational corporations, and even whole governments and sovereign funds, as the future of money.
It hasn’t been an easy year so far for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, falling sharply from its all-time high of $69,000 back in November 2021, when the crypto market capitalisation was $3 trillion.
However, despite the recent dips, Bitcoin remains the best-performing asset class in the world, and has consistently ranked amongst the best for both traditional and crypto investment sectors over the last few years.
Over five years, Bitcoin has posted 355.22% higher returns than Amazon, 321.97% more than Google, 182.65% more than Microsoft, and 166.76% more than Apple.
There is obvious inherent value of digital, borderless, global, tamper-proof, unconfiscatable currencies, especially in our increasingly tech-driven world.
Watch more and more investors and institutions increase their exposure to crypto in the coming months.
And keep a special eye out for those who do not. As we have seen, with crypto, it is often a case of watch what they do, not what they say.