Bitcoin FOMO cools down, portfolio managers harbour high hopes

With Canada's advanced crypto trading regulation out, investors and portfolio managers are attracted towards the digital assets market

By Shashank Bhardwaj

Published: May 23, 2023 09:37:12 AM IST

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Institutional investors and portfolio managers have started considering Bitcoin as a “serious venue” to invest in according to Fred Pye, CEO of 3iQ, Canada’s first Bitcoin fund issuer, who spoke about how investors are attracted towards this asset class post Canada’s advanced crypto trading regulation.

Pye believes that in the midst of global inflation combined with macroeconomic hurdles, fund managers and institutional investors who manage diversified portfolios are looking for alternative asset classes for investing. “The FOMO in Bitcoin is gone; it’s all moved over to AI [artificial intelligence]. So now the institutions and the proper portfolio managers — the people that are responsible for running diversified portfolios — are now starting to take a look at Bitcoin as a serious venue.”

Pye also says that in the next few years, crypto use cases would become a growing trend for institutional investors and would in fact be the theme for 2024.

“It is not just about maximising profits; we’ve got this beautiful technology, now let’s put that beautiful technology to work,” he stated.

This institutional adoption of crypto is bound to face regulatory hurdles still. However, even with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s resistance towards the crypto market, Canada has launched crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) already, which is a hopeful sign for the crypto markets in the country.

Bitcoin and Ether products from 3iQ, Purpose Investments, and Evolve Funds Group among other crypto ETFs have been approved by Canadian regulators. This has attracted millions of dollars to these crypto products.

Pye has said that these crypto products have never been mispriced. and as far as running regulated digital asset ETFs in Canada is concerned, he adds, “there’s no difference about running a Bitcoin ETF than running a gold ETF.”

“We track the price of Bitcoin identically. They’re low fees, and it works. [...] We can cipher trace where the Bitcoin comes from, so we’re only purchasing clean Bitcoin. And I think these are all the characteristics that people are concerned about.”

Canada has been recently consulting its general populace regarding the development of a central bank digital currency. The country’s local monetary authority is collecting the opinion of the citizens, the results of which will most probably be published later in this year.

The writer is the founder at yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash