Citadel Securities, the American market maker, is gearing up to enter the crypto markets this year. Ken Griffin, the Citadel founder, talked about the current state of the markets, especially in light of the existing geopolitical conflicts. He stated that they have now reached a volatile inflection point. Previously, Griffin had warned the younger generation to stay away from crypto asset and had gone on to say that there wasn’t any need for cryptocurrencies. However, in a complete turnaround, he now revealed that his company would engage in the crypto markets in 2022.
He stated that in the months to come, the company would be engaging in the crypto markets. This markets quite a change because in November 2017, Griffin had stated that many of the elements of Bitcoin were quite similar to the tulip bulb mania that had occurred in Holland about hundreds of years ago. This was when Bitcoin had been trading for a value of $10,000. Griffin had said that such bubbles had the tendency to end in tears and that he was concerned about how this current bubble would end. Griffin finally accepted that he had been wrong to have been part of the ‘naysayer camp’ where digital assets are concerned.
As a matter of fact, Griffin said that crypto has turned out to be one of the best stories in finance to be seen in the last 15 years. He said that he had belonged to the naysayer camp for a period of time. However, he added that the market capitalization of crypto had been about $2 trillion when rounded off, which is the evidence you need that he had been completely wrong about it. But, he did say that he remained skeptical yet there were hundreds of millions of people all over the world who would disagree with it.
Griffin said that they were working on helping investors and institutions in solving their portfolio allocation problems. Therefore, he added that they would have to seriously consider becoming a market maker in the crypto space. Citadel Securities has been established to analyze global markets and uses a wide range of strategies to provide its capital partners with high investment returns. Griffin wants the company to incorporate crypto assets to these strategies in the coming months. Citadel Securities had announced their first outside investment in January worth $1.5 billion from two notable crypto venture capital companies, Paradigm and Sequoia Capital.
Currently, the total assets under management of the Citadel hedge fund are about $38 billion. A separate entity, Citadel Securities has a valuation of $22 billion, after the investments. Griffin had been skeptical of crypto as recent as November. At that time, he had stated that people were focused on new ideas and was worried that when it comes to cryptocurrencies, some of this passion could be displaced. Even though the billionaire investor touted Ether (ETH)’s properties, he said that assets based on Ethereum would eventually replace Bitcoin in the market because of the latter’s environmental impact.
