Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, gambled on Bitcoin, and it seems to have paid off. Founders Fund invested millions in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) last year before the latest bull run, which saw BTC climb by around 124% and ETH by 75%.
Strategic Re-Entry After Crypto Winter
Institutional appetite for cryptocurrencies continues to make headlines, with Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund reportedly pouring $200 million into BTC and ether in 2023.
According to a report from Reuters citing anonymous sources, Founders Fund splashed $100 million in each of the two leading cryptos from late summer to early fall of 2023. BTC was trading below $30,000 at the time of the acquisitions.
The price of Bitcoin shattered the $50,000 mark on Feb. 12, attaining a milestone it last traded at in December 2021. The ascendant crypto has since retreated to around $48,700 at press time, but it still indicates that the San Fransisco-based venture capital firm has accrued considerable profits from its investment move. BTC has been on a tear in recent months as the excitement of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) approvals in the U.S. ramped up in 2023.
Founders Fund is one of the earliest institutional players in the digital asset space, making considerable BTC purchases from 2014. However, the company subsequently sold all its eight-year BTC cache a month before the wintry freeze of 2022 enveloped the crypto market, generating as much as $1.8 billion in returns.
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is a longtime Bitcoin advocate, previously asserting that the OG crypto was tantamount to digital gold. During the 2021 bull market, the self-proclaimed “pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist” revealed he felt he was “underinvested” in BTC, adding that the rise in the value of crypto assets “tells us that we are at a complete bankruptcy moment for the central banks.”
Thiel has invested in several crypto-focused ventures, including Bitcoin mining company Layer1 Technologies and blockchain development platform Alchemy.