Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund sold most of his crypto a month before the billionaire raved about Bitcoin at a conference in Miami

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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, the Financial Times reported, citing a person familiar with the funds. According to the FT, two-thirds of his crypto investment consisted of Bitcoin.

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

But in April, at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Thiel made no mention of the massive sale of his crypto holdings. He also hasn’t wavered in his support for Bitcoin. During a speech, he said: We are at the end of the fiat currency regime, and added that Bitcoin was undervalued but had all the potential to replace gold.

Founders Fund declined to comment to Reuters.

The price of almost all cryptocurrencies has fallen in the past 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 collapse of FTX and the criminal charges against former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in particular have caused damage to several other companies and drawn undue 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.

Due in part to its sale of Bitcoin, as well as exits from longtime companies like Airbnb and Thiel’s co-founded data analytics group Palantir, Founders Fund has returned around $13 billion to investors through 2020. and late last year, according to the FT. The company has over $11 billion under management.

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