Confidence in crypto survives despite Terra’s collapse, as two of Wall Street’s major players invest in crypto trading software provider Elwood Technologies.
Barclays and Goldman Sachs have invested in Elwood Technologies, formerly known as Elwood Asset Management, in hopes that the $500 million company will be able to attract institutional investment.
The recent crypto market crash has seen the top 500 digital assets fall by over 50 percent.
The two Wall Street titans joined the venture arms of venture capital firms Dawn Capital and Germany’s Commerzbank and Galaxy Digital, a merchant bank focusing on investments, in a funding round well-planned before the collapse of Terra. Investing money.
Compared to Terra’s recent failure, Elwood said the funding is focused around infrastructure rather than short-term returns.
Elwood sells software to financial institutions wishing to enter the crypto sector through significant investments. It works with banks, hedge funds, crypto exchanges and fintechs that need access to crypto trading data by plugging Elwood’s proprietary software into existing trading platforms.
“As institutional demand for cryptocurrencies grows, we are actively expanding our market presence and capabilities to meet customer demand,” said Matthew McDermott, Head of Digital Asset, Goldman Sachs.
Elwood’s partnership with Bloomberg
Back in February, Elwood partnered with Bloomberg to combine Elwood’s crypto trading platform with Bloomberg’s order management system, so that Elwood investors could manage their crypto and traditional investments in one place.
Last year, Elwood also sold $1 billion in blockchain-based fund assets to CoinShares. The deal was part of a larger deal with CoinShares to purchase Elwood’s indexing business for $17 million.
“Unless the infrastructure is there, and you get the comfort around the quality of the underlying architecture, you won’t really be able to get the quantity to match the opportunity,” said James Stickland, Elwood’s CEO.
Alan Howard, CEO of hedge fund Braven Howard, one of the UK’s foremost cryptocurrency investors, is the founder of Elwood Technologies. He previously invested in UK-based digital asset custodian Copper.co and Asian crypto platform Kiktrade.
Increasing Flow to Crypto Hedge Funds
Many traders believe that crypto is still ripe for hedge-fund dominance, despite the market’s many inefficiencies.
In January, Howard unveiled BH Digital, a crypto hedge fund that seeks to capitalize on arbitrage between cryptocurrency prices, which oversees over $250,000.
“More funds see crypto as the fifth asset class,” along with stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities, said Galaxy Digital’s Robert Bogucci to the Wall Street Journal in March.
“In many ways, crypto trading is similar to other trading assets, but has different risks,” said Agustin LeBron of crypto trading company Raposa. Hudson Bay Capital Management LP, a hedge fund based in New York, has seen a steady increase in the profits of crypto management.
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