$ 20 billion in Custody Crypto: Coinbase Sees ‘Capital Explosion’ by Institutional Investors

Coinbase has revealed it has had an “explosion of incoming capital.” Its assets under custody currently at $ 20 billion, of which $ 14 billion has been accumulated since April. Coinbase highlights a series of bullish events that have “really liberated” a wave of institutional adoption.

Coinbase has $ 20 billion under custody

Coinbase Head of Institutional Comment, Brett Tejpaul, talked about the institutional demand for bitcoin in an interview with Heidrick & Struggles International, published on Friday.

Tejpaul has 25 years experience in sales and trading, with nearly 17 years at Barclays, and nine years at JPMorgan. He explained that he joined Coinbase six months ago, and is now “responsible for growing the institutional adoption of cryptocurrency, across sales, trading, custody, and Prime.” Prime is Coinbase’s services for institutional clients, including asset managers, hedge funds, and VCs.

“It’s a wonderful time for crypto … Sometimes timing is everything,” opined Tejpaul. “We’ve had an explosion of activity,” he added, adding:

I joined in April this year, at that time our assets, our institutional assets under custody were $ 6 billion, today we’re over $ 20 billion, so more than threefold increases.

“Earlier in the summer, we acquired an operating platform called Tagomi and brought it with us overnight, it transformed our ability to cater to institutional clients who want to use smart routing and algorithmic execution, so the stat there is that our trading volumes. 20 times more than they were at the start of the year, ”continued Tejpaul.

“We are now measuring the fresh capital coming into crypto, being allocated primarily to bitcoin in the billions,” he described, noting:

Week after week after week, we’ve had an explosion of incoming capital.

Tejpaul said Coinbase had “upgraded” its banking and audit partners: JPMorgan and Deloitte. “Both of those companies went through a period of one to two years of due diligence to satisfy themselves that we had the KYC, very AML, and the fact that we sort ourselves and operate as a bank and have chosen to have our regulation, and so we are a safe onramp. ”

He then highlighted recent bullish events in the crypto space, starting with famed hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, who in May said he had invested about 2% of his portfolio into bitcoin. In October, Jones said he saw a lot of upside with bitcoin.

Jones’s decision was “important because it is a calling card for other traditional macro companies, who think of bitcoin as a store of value, bitcoin as a potential tail risk hedge for the portfolio,” Tejpaul detailed, adding:

We have seen an unbelievable wave of organizations following Paul’s lead.

He also mentioned the Nasdaq-listed Microstrategy that invested $ 425 million in bitcoin and made the cryptocurrency a major Treasury reserve asset. CEO Michael Saylor has become a bitcoin bull, personally investing $ 240 million in BTC.

Other famous hedge fund managers who have made bullish statements about bitcoin include Bill Miller, who said all major banks will eventually come into contact with bitcoin, and Stan Druckenmiller, who called bitcoin an attractive store of potential value beat gold.

Tejpaul further shared what a typical day looks like for him on the podcast. “By 9:30 in the morning, I had five separate institutional clients called to invest over $ 100 million each.” He explained that people sitting on the sidelines “are now looking at big banks, large accountancy firms, large hedge funds, large endowments, and now Paypal is entering this space,” concluding:

It has actually released a second wave of institutional adoption.

What do you think of institutional investors overflowing into crypto? Let us know in the comments section below.

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