Pimco Embracing Digital Assets as Crypto Market Cap Crosses $2.7 Trillion CIO Daniel Ivascyn told CNBC that the firm feels comfortable with the asset class from a diligence perspective, and some of the hedge fund portfolios trade crypto macro proxies or other linked securities.
> Pimco’s Chief Investment Officer told CNBC that the fixed-income fund plans to invest more in cryptocurrencies
> This comes as the first bitcoin ETFs launch in the US, and the world’s largest digital asset shatters through all-time highs
Pimco Chief Investment Officer Daniel Ivascyn said his firm is bullish on bitcoin and believes in the disruptive power of decentralized finance during an interview with CNBC on Wednesday.
Pimco is an investment firm specializing in fixed income, with $2.21 trillion in assets under management. Ivascyn said during the interview that some of its hedge fund portfolios are already dealing with listed crypto macro proxies, or other digital asset linked securities, as the firm prepares itself for a “rapidly changing environment that offers a pretty significant value proposition, particularly among younger generations.”
“We’re looking at potentially trading certain cryptocurrencies as part of our trend-following strategies or quant-oriented strategies, then doing more work on the fundamental side,” Ivascyn said during an interview with CNBC. “This will be a gradual process where we spend a lot of time on the internal diligence side speaking to investors. And we’ll take baby steps in an area that’s rapidly growing.”
Ivascyn’s comments were made on a day bitcoin shattered past its all-time high of $64,899 and is now priced at just over $66,000.
“You have to understand decentralized finance, because it will be disruptive, and it very well may disrupt our industry, in our business in particular,” Ivascyn said during the interview.
Ivascyn’s comments come a week after the CEO of BlackRock Larry Fink said that crypto represents “huge opportunities.”The entire digital asset ecosystem now has a market cap of $2.7 trillion. The total value locked in DeFi has also hit a symbolic high of $100 billion.
Sam Reynolds Blockworks Reporter Sam Reynolds is a Taipei-based reporter, covering digital assets and regulation throughout Asia. Before joining Blockworks he was an editor at Forkast News and an analyst with IDC.
DRAFT BILL SEEKS TO ALLOW BRAZILIAN WORKERS TO BE PAID IN BITCOIN The bill seeks to change the current law that dictates Brazilian workers can only be paid with the national currency. NAMCIOS
A draft bill seeking to allow Brazilian workers to be paid in bitcoin was presented to the country’s Deputies Chamber on November 5. The author, deputy Luizão Goulart (REPUBLIC-PR), shared the natural evolution of money as a cause for his proposal.
“Money was one of the greatest creations in the history of humanity,” per the draft bill. “It allowed us to rise from a primitive barter-based society to an extremely complex and productive society.”
Bitcoin is the natural evolution of money. Whereas all previous forms compromised on a few properties — divisibility, durability, scarcity, salability across time and space, etc., Bitcoin enabled a new paradigm in the history of money, and the deputy noticed.
“At the peak of the financial crisis of 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto, in their white paper, proposes a ‘digital monetary system’ without the need of trust in a financial institution,” the draft bill reads. “Our proposition meets this modernity, establishing that a worker may optionally receive part of their income in any type of cryptocurrency existent in the Financial Market.”
Brazil has been making the headlines lately when it comes to Bitcoin. A recent bill that sought to legalize BTC and cryptocurrency in the country, as well as enforce stricter rules for businesses seeking to provide related services, was misunderstood as a step in the direction of making bitcoin a legal tender in Brazil.
Overall, Brazilians are big into Bitcoin; the broader cryptocurrency market has seen more activity than the stock market in the country for a few years now.
But the bill is just a draft and was only presented to the chamber today. Deputies still need to discuss it and take it to a vote for the draft bill to start being considered, and there is also the possibility that this law never gets enacted. In either case, since it was recently presented, more information will emerge in the coming weeks.
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