Selling the Top: Peter Thiel’s VC Firm Made $1.8B From Crypto

Founders Fund reportedly no longer has a big investment in crypto after closing down most of its eight-year bet

article-image

Source: Shutterstock / Mark Reinstein, modified by Blockworks

share

Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund made a timely crypto trade last year. 

The venture capital firm sold most of its cryptocurrency holdings before last year’s market crash, pulling in $1.8 billion from the trade, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. 

The fund, known to invest in groundbreaking technologies, built a position in crypto over time. It made its first bitcoin investment in 2014, and a majority of its crypto holdings were made up of the original cryptocurrency, partners of the fund told TechCrunch in March last year.

Founders Fund, which has $11 billion in assets under management, sold a big chunk of its crypto at the end of March 2022, a source told the FT. Bitcoin traded around $41,976 at the time, down around 40% from its all-time high.

That well-timed trade was made before the crash of algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) in May, which marked the start of the crypto market carnage. 

A representative for Founders Fund didn’t return Blockworks’ request for comment by press time. 

Notably, Thiel made a pro-bitcoin speech just a month after his fund reportedly sold most of its crypto. He said the rise in bitcoin’s price was an implication that the “central banks are bankrupt” and that it signaled “the end of the fiat money regime.” He also spoke out against bitcoin’s critics, calling billionaire investor Warren Buffett “Enemy No.1” and a “sociopathic grandpa from Omaha.” 

When bitcoin was hovering near $60,000 in 2021, Thiel reportedly said that it was a sign the US political system was not stable. “I don’t know that you should put all your money into bitcoin at $60,000 a bitcoin right now,” he said. “But surely the fact that it is at $60,000 is an extremely hopeful sign.”

Separately, Thiel said at an event in Miami, in October 2021, that he felt he was “underinvested” in bitcoin. He also suggested he had some hesitation in investing in it because he thought “the secret was already known by everybody,” then added that “I think the answers are still to go long” on bitcoin. 

Crypto wasn’t the only investment Founders Fund offloaded. Between 2020 and 2022, the fund had eight other big exits including Airbnb and Palantir, a move that allowed it to return about $13 billion to investors, the FT reported.


Don’t miss the next big story – join our free daily newsletter.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Hilton Metropole | 225 Edgware Rd, London

MON - WED, MARCH 18 - 20, 2024

Crypto’s premier institutional conference returns to London in March 2024. The DAS: London Experience:  Attend expert-led panel discussions and fireside chats  Hear the latest developments regarding the crypto and digital asset regulatory environment directly from policymakers and experts   Grow your network […]

Salt Lake City, UT

WED - FRI, OCTOBER 9 - 11, 2024

Pack your bags, anon — we’re heading west! Join us in the beautiful Salt Lake City for the third installment of Permissionless. Come for the alpha, stay for the fresh air. Permissionless III promises unforgettable panels, killer networking opportunities, and mountains […]

recent research

logo.jpeg

Research

Akash is a general-purpose compute platform with GPUs, storage, LLM training or inference, and validator hosting through its two-sided marketplace.

article-image

Public mining companies have committed about $750 million to buy machines in the last couple months, BlocksBridge Consulting data shows

article-image

Sponsored

Whether real estate, diamonds or energy, crypto has an abundance of opportunities ahead of it through RWA tokenization

article-image

Block’s self-custody bitcoin wallet uses three keys to secure bitcoin

article-image

Montenegro plans to extradite Do Kwon to the US over South Korea, the Wall Street Journal reports

article-image

In the rare cases when fraud is punished — like the Sam Bankman-Fried trial — we should feel no guilt for doing so to the full extent

article-image

A new Reuters report claims that applicants and the SEC continue to work out spot bitcoin ETF details