The co-founder of Paypal and one of the main investors of Facebook, Peter Thiel, invested between 15 and 20 million dollars in bitcoin through his signature The Founders Fund in June 2017, when this cryptocurrency oscillated around $ 2,400 per unit , the Wall Street Journal revealed yesterday.
It is unknown how much of these bitcoins Thiel sold at the time of the currency's greatest boom, when it reached $ 20,000, but its current minimum profit is in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, says the well-known media reference to nearby sources to the investor and his venture capital firm.
Last October, Thiel, whose individual fortune is 2.2 billion dollars, said people were "underestimating bitcoin." "If the bitcoin ends up as a cyberrequivalent of gold, it still has a lot of potential," he added on that occasion.
Few of the prominent investors have bought large sums of bitcoins, perhaps fearful of the volatility of the cryptocurrency or lack of understanding about its operation and potential. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, Jamie Dimon, has described bitcoin as a "fraud", while Bridgewater Associates founder Raymond Dalio said it was a bubble. On the contrary, for Peter Thiel, bitcoin is a reserve value.
For its part, the firm Founders managed funds of more than $ 3 billion and has bought participation in some 100 companies, including Facebook, Airbnb Inc., SpaceX and Lyft. Most recent investments include hedge funds based on cryptocurrencies such as Metastable Capital and Polychain Capital, which invest in companies based on blockchain technology.
Other companies and institutions have joined similar initiatives giving a vote of confidence to the cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. For example: Consensys, an organization whose purpose is to support entrepreneurship based on the development of decentralized technologies, announced in September 2017 the creation of an investment fund in order to support blockchain startups.
In the same order of ideas, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange made public its intentions to found a venture capital market through a platform based on blockchain. Information released by the CEO of this institution in August of last year.
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