Throughout 2020, more than a handful of traditional financial giants have picked up stacks of Bitcoin (BTC), including the likes of billionaire Paul Tudor Jones and business intelligence firm MicroStrategy. These investments are part of a flow of big money entrances into BTC, Gemini crypto exchange co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss recently said.
“This is the most sophisticated investors, the smartest people in the room, buying the Bitcoin quietly, so it’s not a FOMO [fear of missing out] thing,” Tyler said in a CNBC interview, published on Friday. Major institutions are here for this go-round, as opposed to Bitcoin’s retail-led bull run in 2017, Tyler explained.
Over the course of this year, in addition to Tudor Jones and Microstrategy, Stanley Druckenmiller, Jack Dorsey’s Square, MassMutual, and Guggenheim Partners have all gained exposure to Bitcoin. Their crypto plays come in line with an unstable global economic atmosphere rife with money printing efforts.
Bitcoin is often compared to gold as a store of value and inflation hedge. Druckenmiller and Tudor Jones align themselves with such a narrative.
Tyler Winklevoss added:
“Also, you have publicly-traded companies like Square and MicroStrategy putting their treasury cash into Bitcoin because they’re worried about the oncoming inflation and the scourge of inflation with all the money printing and the stimulus from the COVID pandemic lockdowns.”
When asked about Bitcoin’s volatility as an asset for transactions, the brothers called Bitcoin a “buy and hold” strategy comparative to gold. “We see Bitcoin right now as an emergent store of value that will disrupt gold, and that gets us to a $9 trillion market cap for Bitcoin,” Tyler said. “So it actually doesn’t have to be used as a currency, and the volatility doesn’t matter if it’s actually a store of value,” he added. The billionaire also expects some level of dwindling volatility for the asset over time.
At time of publication, Bitcoin’s market cap sits at about $335 billion — a far cry from $9 trillion, although the asset recently broke its all-time price high, set in 2017.