First Mover: The Smart Money (Literally) Buying Crypto as Harvard Said to Be Holding

January 26, 2021

Everything you need to make sense of the crypto markets and beyond

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By the CoinDesk Markets Team

Edited by Bradley Keoun

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Bitcoin (BTC)

-1.3% $31,845

Ether (ETH)

-0.1% $1,316

(Price data as of Jan. 26 @11:37 UTC)

TODAY:

Price Point: Bitcoin was lower, but just barely – hovering around $32K for a fourth straight day.

Market Moves: The brain trust has blessed cryptocurrencies, with endowments for Harvard, Yale and other prestigious U.S. universities now reportedly lapping up digital assets. For bitcoin marketeers, there's a new $600B money pot at stake.

Bitcoin Watch: Options worth $4B set to expire on Friday, potentially leading to heightened price volatility in coming days, CoinDesk's Omkar Godbole writes.

What's Hot: It's complexity-squared as CDOs come to DeFi; ether balances on exchanges fall to 15-month low; Winklevosses' Gemini expands in Singapore; market value of DeFi tokens tops $45B; Morgan Stanley former chief economist sees weaker dollar.

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Price Point

Bitcoin was lower, hovering around $32,000 for a fourth straight day.

A break above $35,000 could mark a "potential trend reversal, giving hope to the bulls," the Norwegian cryptocurrency-analysis firm Arcane Research told clients Tuesday in a report. "A break of the $30K support will probably see the price fall down to the $26K-$27K area."

In traditional markets, European indexes were higher, bolstered by a flurry of corporate dealmaking announcements, despite a spreading coronavirus caseload, the prospect of stricter containment measures and rioting in the Netherlands.

U.S. stock futures fluctuated, after Congressional leaders said passage of President Joe Biden's proposed $1.9 trillion relief package might not happen until mid-March. Gold weakened 0.3% to $1,850 an ounce.

Market Moves

The roster of cryptocurrency buyers keeps expanding, with endowment funds for some of the most prestigious U.S. universities now reportedly nosing in.

Funds for Harvard, Yale, Brown and the University of Michigan have quietly been buying cryptocurrency for the past year or so through accounts held at Coinbase, CoinDesk's Ian Allison reported Monday, citing two sources familiar with the situation. Harvard has the largest university endowment of any with over $40 billion in assets, and Yale is close behind with more than $30 billion.

It's a key development, since digital-market analysts say growing interest from big institutional buyers has been a major factor in bitcoin's quadrupling in price last year, with another 11% gain just in January alone.

While the university allocations likely represent a fraction of a percent of their total assets, the news reveals yet another potential source of demand for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies at a time when corporations and money managers like BlackRock and Fidelity have been lapping it up.

Based on the most recent data from the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. university and college endowments had assets with a market value of about $600 billion as of 2017.

Data extracted from the Bitcoin blockchain appear to show that big institutional investors (represented by addresses with more than 1,000 bitcoin) have continued to accumulate even with the cryptocurrency's price rally stalling in recent weeks. (Coin Metrics)

As First Mover has discussed previously, the corporate treasuries of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index of large U.S. stocks represent a $2.3 trillion money pot of cash and short-term investments that could conceivably be at least partially allocated to bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

And just since October when Square, the payments company helmed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, announced it would put some $50 million, or 1% of its assets, into bitcoin, the number of corporate treasurers and fund managers following suit has expanded rapidly.

At that time, according to the handy website bitcointreasuries.org, there were just 60,927 BTC in corporate treasuries and professionally managed funds, valued at $619 million. The amount has since swelled to 1.22 million bitcoin valued at about $39.7 billion.

The developments keep coming:

And it's apparently not just bitcoin that these big players are after. As reported Monday by CoinDesk's Muyao Shen, there are indications that the recent rally in ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, has been fueled in part by institutional buying.

Some of them are even dipping into the exotic, fast-growing and often risky arena of decentralized finance, known as DeFi – an interlocking array of semi-automated trading and lending platforms that entrepreneurs, coders and even hobbyists are assembling with blockchain technology and open-source software.

“The more adventurous institutions are exploring Ethereum and DeFi after they looked at bitcoin,” Arthur Cheong, founder and portfolio manager at DeFi-focused crypto fund DeFiance Capital, told Shen.

With the smartest money – literally – now buying cryptocurrencies, it's hard to imagine more institutional players won't follow. (We're looking at you, pension funds with $4 trillion.)

“I’d imagine there are a few big names we don’t yet know of currently buying up bitcoin,” said Chris Thomas, head of digital asset for Swissquote Bank, as reported Monday by CoinDesk's Daniel Cawrey. “We’ll likely discover them very soon, by which point they will have accumulated quite substantial volumes.”

- Bradley Keoun

Bitcoin Watch

Open interest in options contracts on Deribit exchange with Jan. 29 expiration date, plotted based on their strike prices. (Deribit)

Bitcoin options worth $4 billion are set to expire on Friday, potentially exacerbating price swings as January draws to a close.

Some 120,300 contracts are due for expiration on Friday on major exchanges Deribit, CME, Bakkt, OKEx, LedgerX, according to the data provider Skew.

Much of that amount can be found on Deribit, the world’s largest crypto options exchange by trading volume: It's on track for a record monthly bitcoin options expiry of 102,162 contracts (nearly $3.5 billion).

At current price levels, more than 80% of the options open interest would expire out-of-the-money, or worthless. But if the bitcoin market starts moving in the next few days, big players might be forced into new hedging transactions, which could give rise to more significant price turbulence.

“If BTC rapidly jumps to all-time highs within the next few days, it’s expected market makers will aggressively hedge their out-of-the-money short call option exposures, which would likely increase overall market volatility and momentum in the underlying price,” Samneet Chepal, quantitative analyst at the quantitative and systematic digital asset investment firm Ledger Prime, told CoinDesk.

- Omkar Godbole

Read More: Large Bitcoin Options Positions May Boost Price Volatility This Week

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Tweet of the Day

Introducing State of Crypto, a CoinDesk Newsletter About Policy

As the U.S. presidency changes hands, CoinDesk's global macro and policy reporter Nikhilesh De launches his State of Crypto weekly newsletter to break down how the new administration could shape the cryptocurrency industry.

State of Crypto covers how policy and regulation impact the crypto world – and the other way around. Subscribe to receive State of Crypto every Tuesday.

Disclaimer: The information presented in this message is intended as a news item that provides a brief summary of various events and developments that affect, or that might in the future affect, the value of one or more of the cryptocurrencies described above. The information contained in this message, and any information liked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. The information presented herein is accurate only as of its date, and it was not prepared by a research analyst or other investment professional. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency before deciding to purchase or sell any such instruments.

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