With overstretched valuations in the tech sector last year, Peter Theil considered the option of investing in Bitcoins.
Silicon Valley billionaire and co-founder of PayPal – Peter Theil is said to have invested massive sums of money in Bitcoin, reports The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper said that“Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, has amassed hundreds of millions of dollars of the volatile cryptocurrency,” bitcoin.
Founders Fund, based out of San-Francisco is known for its early bets on Airbnb and SpaceX and is trying to establish a foothold in the cryptomarket, according to the person familiar with the matter. The person also said that the firm has bought around $15 – $20 million USD worth Bitcoins, possibly before September 2017 which are now worth several hundred million dollars.
The Founders fund has more than $3 billion under the management team and is said to have also made lucrative bets on more than 100 companies that include the likes Facebook, Airbnb, and Lyft. Moreover, Founders is also said to have purchased stakes in cryptoasset hedge funds and bitcoin infrastructure companies like Metastable Capital, Polychain Capital, BitPay, and BitGo.
In the early years of Bitcoin creation, Peter Theil did not believe that Bitcoin has the potential to achieve mainstream popularity and adoption. However, having observed it over a period of time and looking to the investor’s response towards Bitcoin, Peter Theil started to realize that this could serve “as a reserve form of money.” In one of the conferences back in October 2017, Theil compared the cryptocurrency with gold. WSJ quoted him saying “If bitcoin ends up being the cyber equivalent of gold, it has a great potential left,”
At the time of investing in Bitcoin, the venture-capital firm told its investors that this investment is a high-risk high-reward bet, and the decision to venture into the cryptocurrency space is made owing to overstretched valuations in the tech sector.
The WSJ report reads: “The representatives have told firm backers that a cascade of cash into technology companies has stretched their valuations to historic highs, making stakes in startups as dangerous a risk as ever. Bitcoin, on the other hand, could multiply several times over in the coming years.” Currently, it is not known whether Founders has sold off its Bitcoin investments or still continues to hold them.
Over the past year, many investors have parked their investments in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies having seen a huge support for the digital currency market. Traditional financial institutions which were earlier quite skeptical about the growth of Bitcoin had to rethink their opinion as the cryptocurrency manages to survive against all odds and criticism coming from different parts of the world.
After CME’s announcement of Bitcoin Futures Markets, a new euphoria had gripped the markets and retail and institutional investors started pumping millions of dollars in the crypto markets taking it to new highs. Over the last year, the crypto market valuations have surged by more than 3500% as the cryptocurrency markets are currently valued at more than $700 billion.
With Bitcoin remaining as the centre of attraction through 2017, other altcoins like Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Stellar etc. have emerged as powerful contenders in the end of last year.
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