Billionaire investor Mike Novogratz shared his latest thoughts on Bitcoin when he was interviewed by Michael Saylor, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of MicroStrategy Inc, at the recent “Bitcoin for Corporations” event.
Former hedge fund manager Novogratz is the Founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, “a diversified financial services and investment management innovator in the digital asset, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology sector.”
Novogratz started by introducing Galazy Digital:
“We’ve got Bitcoin and other coins on our balance sheet. We have over 90 venture investments in the space. We’ve invested in exchanges, in custody, in protocols, in the decentralized finance revolution, all across the space. We have a sales and trading business. So we’re big liquidity providers. We trade over a billion dollars a day in tokens, and so we’ll make deep markets to anyone who wants them.
“We have one of the biggest derivative businesses, selling structured products, doing derivatives for mining companies, other corporates who want to limit their risk or override strategies on their Bitcoin. We have an investment banking business, going to corporates — mostly corporates in the crypto company but not only — and providing expertise…
“And we have an asset management product: we have the only Mercer-rated Bitcoin fund. We have created the Bloomberg Galaxy crypto index which was supposed to be and I think will be the S&P 500 of the space… We’re launching an Ether fund right now, and we have a $300 million fund that invests in the virtual space — we call it Galaxy Interactive…“
As for his outlook on the price of Bitcoin, Novogratz had this to say:
“I think we’ve hit a tipping point in this network effect I talked about, and my base case is: if I look at Bitcoin as a percentage of gold, I think Bitcoin is going to be digital gold. I know a lot of people disagree with me. They’ll think, ‘No, it going to be money. It’s going to be the blockchains of all blockchains,’ I just don’t think so. I think it’s got a beautiful lane as a store of value. It was perfectly designed as a store of value…
“I think of it as, ‘What percentage of market cap is gold?’ We’re about 6% of the gold market cap. My sense is by the end of the year, we are easily 10%. So, that gets you to Bitcoin $55,000-$60,000. I know as soon as we get to 10, we’re going to say, ‘Well why 10? Why not 20?’ And when we get to 20, we’re going to be 50, and then we’re going to be 100.
“And so, I would be $60,000 end of this year, and I’m $500,000 probably by 2024-2025… It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens with more and more education, with more and more seminars like this, with more and more communities buying into the idea.“
Last Thursday (February 11), Novogratz commented on Twitter on two important pieces of crypto news.
First, with regard to Mastercard’s announcement on February 10 that it is “bringing crypto onto its network”, he said:
“The Mastercard news is huge. A few months ago it would have been all the crypto community would focus on for the ensuing month. Now we are getting so much good news it almost goes unnoticed. Let me repeat. It is huge news. Crypto adoption is here.“
As for the announcement by Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (“BNY Mellon”) on February 11 that it is building “a client-facing prototype that is designed to be the industry’s first multi-asset digital custody and administration platform for traditional and digital assets”, he said:
“If there was any doubt left that the institutional herd was coming, there shouldn’t be. welcome to the age of crypto.“