Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund Made Over $1 Billion Offloading 8 Years of Crypto Investments Just Before Markets Turned Down

A month before billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel touted the benefits of Bitcoin during a speech at a conference in Miami, his venture capital firm Founders Fund had already unloaded an eight-year-old cryptocurrency bet. currencies.

While crypto was once one of its top positions, by March 2022 the company had generated $1.8 billion by selling the vast majority of its crypto holdings, them FinancialTimes reported, citing a person familiar with the fund. According to the FT, two-thirds of his crypto investment consisted of Bitcoin.

The selloff was timely and protected the company from Bitcoin’s price crash later that year, which would take it to around $15,599 last Novemberits lowest price in two years.

But in April, at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Thiel made no mention of his fund’s massive crypto selloff. He hasn’t wavered in his support for Bitcoin either. During a speechhe said, “We are at the end of the fiat currency regime,” and added that Bitcoin was undervalued but “has all the potential to replace gold.”

Founders Fund declined to comment to Reuters.

The price of almost all cryptocurrencies have fallen last year as the industry saw the bankruptcies of some of its most high-profile companies, including crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and crypto exchange FTX. The FTX collapse and the criminal charges against former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in particular have caused damage to several other businesses and have attracted inordinate attention from regulators.

The San Francisco-based Founders Fund first bought Bitcoin in 2014 when it traded for less than $1,000 and grew its holdings over the following eight years. Thiel was also one of the first well-known investors to invest money in Bitcoin.

In part, because of its selling of Bitcoin, as well as exits from long-time companies like Airbnb and the Palantir data analytics group, Founders Fund, co-founded by Thiel, brought in about $13 billion to investors between 2020 and the end of last year, according to the FT. The company has more than $11 billion under management.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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