While responding to a question from Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Vigna during the Consensus 2019 event on Wednesday, Brian Armstrong Coinbase CEO was happy to share his firm’s success with institutional investors.
His response to the questions posed by Vigna on the involvement of institutional investors in the crypto space was,
“Since our launch 12 months ago, we have just crossed the $1 billion AUM mark. In total, we had 70 institutional investors signing up with each bringing in $150 million AUM monthly. Hence the success we have hard in such a short time.”
Although those groups of investors only had an eye for Bitcoin, their interest for other coins is increasing as time goes by. At the moment Coinbase Custody provides trading services in over 30 coins with staking as a service available for some coins. Apart from just entering the crypto space for investments, institutional investors want more than just having their cash seating idle in the space. According to Armstrong, they want to stack and also participate in voting and even governance on the chain. As more institutional based investors inject more funds into the crypto space, such trends will increase.
Institutions in the Sector aren’t Big Entities
While it is common knowledge that the institutional investors entering the crypto space are big entities with huge assets, the fact is that’s not the case. Although many think its big firms such as BlackRock, Armstrong pointed out its rather smaller entities. His sentiments were echoed by Fred Wilson Union Square Venture partner who was also a panelist during the consensus. Wilson explained further and said,
“Venture tokens and tokens funds are what make up the first two big institutions funds. For the rest, that is, traditional institutions to take their chips and go all in, I don’t see that happening any time soon.”
However, while all the above is happening, things are looking pretty good for Coinbase. Although the platform is geared towards having more advanced traders, on the other hand, Coinbase Pro is also getting influence from the same institutional investors. As per now the latter are responsible for half the trading volume in Coinbase Pro that is 60% of the trading volume.
