Billionaire Steven Cohen, the founder of Point72 Asset Management, is reportedly backing a crypto and -focused hedge fund, Bloomberg Friday, July 13.
Cohen invested in Arianna Simpson’s cryptocurrency hedge fund, Autonomous Partners, via his private equity firm Cohen Private Ventures, according to Bloomberg’s anonymous source.
Point72 Asset Management, whose most recent is almost $24 billion, is headed by Andrew B. Cohen, who is also the Managing Director of Cohen Private Ventures.
Simpson founded Autonomous Partners in December 2017. In an with Fortune on July 12, she said that the fund has already secured “funding in the low eight digits” from VC and private equity firm , CEO Brian Armstrong, and former COO and Craft Ventures co-founder .
Simpson emphasized that the fund seeks investments from partners that “can be very much value-add beyond their capital.”
As Fortune reports, a low percentage of Autonomous Partners is devoted to major cryptocurrencies such as (BTC) and (ETH). The fund is mostly focused on crypto infrastructure projects, anonymity-oriented altcoins, and crypto companies that tackle scalability issues. The fund has also invested in , a protocol for .
Simpson told Fortune that her fund has held off from investing in (XRP) pending clarification from U.S. regulators as to whether XRP will be . She added that she “think[s] the whole space is still waiting for a bit more clarity.”
According to data from Autonomous Research, the number of crypto-focused funds was at 251 as of April 2018, 175 of which were opened in . In 2018, only 26 more funds have been established, signalling a possible downtrend in momentum.
As Cointelegraph April 3, various sources from the crypto space have warned that 10 percent of crypto funds could potentially be forced to close in 2018, allegedly due to the negative impact of regulatory uncertainty.
In March, news of a U.S. (SEC) into up to 100 crypto-related hedge funds indicated increasing scrutiny of their activities.
Published at Fri, 13 Jul 2018 12:00:00 +0000
Blockchain
