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On Tuesday (March 1), a well-known billionaire hedge fund manager admitted being wrong about crypto and said that his firm has to “give serious consideration to being a market maker in crypto.”
Kenneth C. Griffin is the Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Investment Officer of , a global alternative investment firm that is the parent of Citadel Securites, the market maker that was — according to CNBC — “subjected to close scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and regulators, after Robinhood Markets and several other brokers restricted trading in shares of GameStop in January last year.”
On 4 October 2021, Griffin addressed The Economic Club of Chicago. During a conversation with Bloomberg TV Correspondent Erik Schatzker, Griffin said:
“I wish all this passion and energy that went to crypto was directed towards making the United States stronger… What a crazy concept this is, that we as a country embrace so many bright, young, talented people to come up with a replacement for our reserve currency.“
And on 18 July 2018, he made it perfectly clear that he was not an admirer of the booming cryptocurrency industry. While speaking at the Delivering Alpha Conference in New York, the American billionaire said:
“I don’t have a single portfolio manager [of mine] who has told me we should buy crypto, not a single portfolio manager. I have a hard time finding myself wanting to be in the position of being a liquidity provider to a product that I don’t believe in.“
As for Bitcoin, he said:
“I still scratch my head.“
Well, crypto nearly $2 trillion total market cap seems to have changed Griffin’s mind judging by what he said yesterday during an interview on Bloomberg TV’s “Wealth With David Rubenstein”:
“Crypto has been one of the great stories in finance over the course of the last 15 years. And I’ll be clear, I’ve been in the naysayer camp over that period of time… But the crypto market today has a market capitalization of about $2 trillion in round numbers, which tells you that I haven’t been right on this call… To the extent that we’re trying to help institutions and investors solve their portfolio allocation problems, we have to give serious consideration to being a market maker in crypto.“
