Early Bitcoin and Ethereum investor Mike Novogratz is revealing his insight on where the market is heading and what’s needed to trigger a bull run.
Novogratz runs Galaxy Digital, which invests directly in crypto businesses, from ICOs to infrastructure platforms to wallets and custody solutions. At the recent Beyond Blocks Summit in Seoul, he explained why he believes in the New World Order crypto developers are trying to create, and what got him to widen his involvement in crypto far beyond his initial speculative investment in Bitcoin.
“I looked at my portfolio and I had a lot of Bitcoin and I had a lot of investments. I had an investment in Korbit here in Korea. I had an investment in Bitstamp and Zapo – in all kinds of portfolio companies that I’d made a few years earlier. And I had a college roommate, Joe Lubin, who now runs a big company called ConsenSys. But at that point, it was a very small company. And I decided to go visit him and thought he was a little bit smarter than me and he might be able to tell me about my portfolio.
It so happened I walked into his office and was amazed at the energy. It was a small company, 20 to 25 people. I thought it was going to be two. And I was like, how’d you hire 25 people? And they were literally plotting out a revolution. A decentralized revolution.
And it was the first time I understood that crypto was a lot more than just a speculative asset. That this was a social phenomenon; it was a cultural phenomenon and an economic phenomenon. And that the people that were getting involved in it really cared about changing the world. It’s often easy to think this is just about the money, but when you meet the guys that are at the core of it, when you sit with VItalik or Alex Morcos who’s a core developer – or any of the guys, they really do care deeply about a new world order. It came out of the breakdown in the financial system in 2008. And then Europe broke down again in 2012. It came as people feared central authority. And so I got inspired and I bought a bunch of Ether, and it was like 96 cents. When you buy something cheap and it goes higher you start paying a lot of attention to it.”
Novogratz says institutional investors with deep pockets are preparing to jump in the market, and are learning as much as they can about how crypto works to ensure their investments are safe before they take the plunge.
“Two years ago if you’d gone to meet with an institutional investor, they’d know nothing. They’d be very interested to hear you talk, and then you’d leave. And now, when I meet with a CEO or CIO, I’m surprised at how much they know. At how much work they’ve done. Most of them haven’t taken the first step in terms of participating, but woah, they’re doing a lot of work…
I went to visit Jeff Sprecher who’s the CEO of ICE, which is the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange and about 30 other exchanges around the world. They’re the biggest exchange company in the world. And I thought I was going to give him my Bitcoin story. And after about two minutes, I just shut up and started listening. He knew so much more about the plumbing and the future of how coins will be traded than I would ever have imagined.”
According to Novogratz, there are a few pieces of the puzzle missing before those heavy-hitting Wall Street investors will be comfortable going all in on crypto.