Facebook Investor and PayPal Co-founder Peter Thiel Bets Big on Bitcoin – and Wins

Facebook early investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel bought millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin through his VC firm, Founders Fund, and that number is cited to be worth hundreds of millions today.

Venture Capitalists Jumping on the Bitcoin Bandwagon

Peter Thiel runs the Founders Fund, a venture capitalist firm. Reports are showing that the firm purchased somewhere between $15 and 20 million dollars’ worth of the Bitcoin throughout 2017, and thanks to the massive price surge that investment is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The leading cryptocurrency is up over 1,400% since the beginning of 2017, with a recent all-time high of $20,000 being hit in early December. Since the original report, which was published in The Wall Street Journal, the price of Bitcoin has jumped just over 11%, topping out at $15,000 at the time of writing. It is unknown if the firm as sold any of its current holdings, but the Founder’s Fund Bitcoin portfolio is assumed to be the largest piece of the firm’s $1.3 billion venture fund.

Mainstream Adoption Continues

Many traditional financial institutions have turned away from cryptocurrency, with worries about volatile prices and overall legitimacy at the top of the list of their concerns. But in recent months, however, some have overcome their reluctance and are actually beginning to integrate Bitcoin and other digital currencies into their systems. CME Group and CBOE are only two such companies to do so, having launched Bitcoin futures trading on their respective exchanges in the last weeks of 2017.

Elsewhere in the world, some countries are looking to adopt existing cryptocurrencies while others have plans to launch their own state-sponsored versions. In Japan, Bitcoin is already treated as legal tender, while Russia is currently drafting legislation to regulate cryptocurrencies and ICOs. ICOs, in particular, have raised red flags in the past, and regulation could bring some stability to the crypto space. Belarus has completely legalized Bitcoin and ICOs, and on top of this made them completely tax-free for five years.

What do you think of their investment? Do you think this will bring in more investors into the space? Let us know in the comments below!

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