Back in October, the United States’ Securities and Exchange Commission had shot down the last standing Bitcoin ETF application submitted by Bitwise Asset Management. Soon after the same, community sentiment fell, with many in the Bitcoin community especially disappointed by the SEC’s decision.
However, the announcement did not impact the growing institutional interest in the crypto-industry in any way, with various organizations now venturing into the crypto-space.
During a recent interview, Marc Bhargava, President of Tagomi, a prime brokerage service in the cryptocurrency space, piqued the interest of the space by stating that institutional capital will hit the industry in “several waves.” He said,
“The first wave was crypto funds and index products. So I think you still see a lot of family offices or endowments or others not directly buying Bitcoin, but investing in funds.”
Speaking about the second wave, Bhargava suggested that it was evident throughout 2019 as the lending and borrowing markets improved their involvement in the space. Additionally, the Co-founder also believes that there is more liquidity in exchanges since various market-makers are now entering the crypto-industry.
2019 has witnessed Facebook diving into the crypto space and Bhargava believes that the sentiment will continue to rise in 2020 as well, involving major technological entities. He added,
“So, I think that this next 2020 wave of institutional investors are really these large tech firms. And I think that down the road, you definitely will see more from the traditional asset managers–right now, we see more of the family offices who have broader discretionary ability to invest in things, or funds that are primarily hedge funds run by a couple of parts.”
However, Bhargava cautioned that in order to facilitate larger asset managers, it is important to build a better infrastructure so that scalable protocols and mass adoption would become a possibility.
