A year and half and a leap of faith will be required to finally shunt institutional investors into the bitcoin (BTC) market, claims an executive at digital asset management firm CoinShares – adding that “a steady increase building in speed up to a point” over the next 18 months was more likely than a “flurry” of activity.
In an opinion piece for the CoinShares Perspectives newsletter, Frank Spiteri, Chief Revenue Officer wrote,
“It will take 18 months plus a few brave investors to be first over the wall before we see a significant shift in [institutional] investor sentiment.”
Spiteri also opined that “outside of private investors, it is very difficult to generalize investor segments that are more active in crypto.”
He conceded that “we don’t actually have a lot of hard data to go on” when it comes to identifying who buys the most BTC. But he added,
“In our engagements at CoinShares, we see interest and participation from every investor segment, apart from pensions and sovereign wealth funds.”
He echoed some often-expressed sentiments about BTC investment, stating that most large corporations “will only begin to take notice [of bitcoin] once they see an ETF [exchange-traded fund] approved in the USA or if there is evidence that more traditional funds are buying exposure to BTC via ETPs [exchange-traded products] and funds.”
But he also added that fund managers would likely invest more in crypto if they saw that other managers were also keen.
“I can’t count the number of times that portfolio managers have said to us that it would be so much easier to invest if they knew that similar peers of theirs were also invested,”
He noted,
And with so many managers preferring safety in numbers, Spiteri claimed that most were simply biding their time, adding,
“There is significant interest from traditional multi-asset fund managers, but most of the larger ones don’t want to be first-movers and would prefer the safety of the herd.”
As for other bitcoin buyers, he stated,
“Family offices and private banks would probably be the most obvious segments to highlight after private clients, but, even in those segments, it depends on the individual company mandates and their investment styles.”
