2024-02-14 20:07:58
The Founders Fund, founded by Peter Thiel, former CEO of PayPal, among others, invested $100 million in bitcoin in the late summer and early fall of 2023, when the price of the cryptocurrency was still below $30,000. From information given to Reuters it turns out that the venture capital firm has allocated $200 million to buy bitcoin and ethereum in equal proportions.
Founders Fund was founded in 2005 by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Their first capital increase was 50 million dollars, but in 2006, Sean Parker, one of the founders of Napster and the former president of Facebook, appeared. The company was the first investor in Space Exploration Technologies – SpaceX for short – and Palantir Technologies, among others. Peter Thiel was, among other things, the first external investor in Facebook, and in 2014, his fund exceeded $1 billion in net assets. The commitment to the technology is demonstrated by the fact that Founders Fund made a profit of $1.8 billion between 2014 and 2022 in bitcoins that were sold before the collapse of FTX.
In 2023, before the bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank, they advised their companies to withdraw their money from the bank, which failed on March 10, in order to make another capital increase in the Founders Fund. After the biggest bank failure since the economic crisis of 2008, Founders Fund focuses on crypto-enterprises, the assets they manage are more than 12 billion dollars.
Peter Thiel is not the only one opening up to bitcoin
Peter Thiel, co-founder of the fund, has previously publicly acknowledged the positive characteristics of bitcoin, such as value stability and as a hedge once morest central bank policy. The liberal businessman continued to support bitcoin and blockchain technology following several major crypto exchanges collapsed in 2022, sending the leading cryptocurrency down to around $15,000. In the past few days, the price of bitcoin has exceeded $50,000, and although it is still far from its previous peak of $69,000, which it reached in November 2021, the market trend seems clear.
In addition to Peter Thiel’s fund, Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy has also been actively buying “bargain” bitcoins in the past year. The company that develops business intelligence and cloud services bought more than 56,000 bitcoins in 2023, bringing the total to more than 190,000 BTC, with a total value of around $9.5 billion.
In January 2024, Wall Street giants BlackRock and Fidelity Investments also entered the crypto industry following the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the first US bitcoin spot ETFs. Thanks to the decision billions of dollars came in by institutional investors into the market. The period of revival has thus begun, and who knows how much profit the bitcoins accumulated in 2023 will generate in the coming years.
1707941388
#PayPal #bought #million #worth #BTC
