Crypto lawyer John Lore has revealed that a number of American academic institutions have decided to invest in cryptocurrency hedge funds, despite their controversial nature.
The US-based attorney and founder of Capital Fund Law Group said in an interview with Business Insider:
“We’re seeing some academic institutions getting involved on a limited basis for strategic reasons. I can’t say the names of [the universities] because that’s attorney-client but we have people mostly on the East Coast that have begun doing investments in this space on a fairly modest basis.”
Lore’s New York law firm specializes in delivering legal services to the hedge fund industry, advising around 30 crypto funds in the last year alone. According to the lawyer, the majority of the capital invested in these funds comes from “high net worth individuals and, on a very limited basis, family offices.”
He added that at the time where are investors in the market who, at this point, are “putting in a very small percentage of their net worth.” Per his words, this is what would be expected, and what the firm believes is appropriate.
The attorney also explained that he doesn’t think we’ll see institutional investors putting their funds into crypto any time soon, largely because of the regulatory uncertainty surrounding the digital currency market. In his view, university endowment funds are the exception to this rule:
“We see academia as a tie between these somewhat young and enthusiastic fund managers and capital raising.”
Universities have recently shown an increasing interest in cryptos and the blockchain technology underpinning them, with one of the developers of Ethereum having recently set up blockchain facilities at the universities of both Edinburgh and Tokyo.
In addition to this, a number of leading global universities are adding courses on the technology to their existing offerings, with Cambridge and Oxford at the forefront of this development.
Featured image from Max Pixel
