Billionaire investor George Soros’ family office, Soros Fund Management, has invested in Bitcoin, according to Soros Fund CEO/CIO Dawn Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick told Bloomberg in an interview on Tuesday that, “From our perspective again, we own some coins, not a lot, and the coins themselves are less interesting than the use cases of DeFi and things like that.”
“I’m not sure Bitcoin is only viewed as an inflation hedge. Here I think it’s crossed the chasm to mainstream. Cryptocurrencies now have a market cap of over $2 trillion. There’s 200 million users around the world, so I think this has gone mainstream,” she added.
Fitzpatrick’s comments confirm previous anonymous reports that said Soros Fund has started trading Bitcoin. Soros Fund is also an investor in crypto firms such as NYDIG and Lukka, but this appears to be the firm’s first public confirmation of having investments in cryptocurrency directly.
The Soros Fund Management family office has a total of $27 billion in net assets under management. And the fact that the Soros family office, which manages money for the billionaire philanthropist, now publicly has some stake in the crypto game adds to the legitimacy of the crypto sector.
Earlier, the firm also said it liquidated a $5 billion 2020 equity investment to use in the crypto market, with a particular interest in the DeFi space.
Soros’s successful career has frequently pitted him against entire countries. He bet big against the Thai baht amid the Asian financial crisis of 1997. He made a fortune betting against the yen and then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic plans in 2013. And now Soros is betting on Bitcoin.
Remarkably, that the price of Bitcoin promptly blasted off after Fitzpatrick’s remarks, rising nearly 10% to more than $55,500 per coin.