By
Tolu Ajiboye
October 10th, 2023
With digital assets becoming more popular and authorities working on regulation, several hedge funds have taken an interest. Some in the investment space have called Bitcoin a hedge against inflation.
The world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater is planning to invest in its first crypto fund reports Coindesk. Sources familiar with the matter revealed that the hedge fund, however, has no plans of investing in crypto at the moment.
Bridgewater was founded in 1975 by Ray Dalio, a graduate of the Havard Business School. It is currently the world’s largest hedge fund with $150 billion in assets under management (AUM).
A source claimed last month that “Bridgewater is in a first-half plan this year. They’re planning on having a small slug of their fund deployed directly into digital assets.”
Another said that “Bridgewater is looking to get involved. They are doing serious diligence: liquidity, service providers and whatnot.”
When contacted by Coindesk on 22 February to verify information that the fund was considering investing in crypto by mid-2022, a representative responded, “While we won’t comment on our positions, we can say Bridgewater continues to actively research crypto but is not currently planning on investing in crypto.”
Founder Ray Dalio has been public about his crypto investments. The billionaire, highly revered in the world of finance, referred to Bitcoin as an “alternative to gold” for the younger generation. In May last year, Dalio revealed that he had made personal investments in both Bitcoin and Ethereum. He urged investors to diversify their portfolios by investing in crypto.
With digital assets becoming more popular and authorities working on regulation, several hedge funds have taken an interest. Some in the investment space have called Bitcoin a hedge against inflation.
Dario previously warned that crypto could eventually be viewed as a threat to governments. There over the past few months, there have been outright bans and threats of bans on crypto. Last week, the crypto community waited anxiously for the European Union Parliament to vote on a crypto bill that contained a section calling for banning of cryptocurrencies that use the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus. This would have meant an outright ban on Bitcoin. Legislators voted against the anti-PoW clause of the Markets in Crypto Assets legislation.
In what many feared would be a blanket ban on crypto in the US, President Joe Biden earlier this month signed an executive order in which he called for central bank digital currency (CBDC) research to be conducted “urgently”.
