Ex-Falcon Banker to Oversee Crypto Fund

Ex-Falcon Banker to Oversee Crypto Fund

A top executive of the defunct Swiss wealth manager will run a cryptocurrency fund.

Cyber Capital is appointing Katie Richards as its CEO, effective April 1, the Netherlands-based fund manager said in a statement on Wednesday. The 53-year-old was most recently at Falcon Private Bank, which is being wound down, as head of digital custody and trading as well as process management.

One of the most prominent female executives in Switzerland’s crypto scene, Richards has worked for both UBS and Credit Suisse as well as IBM and Salomon Brothers. Cyber Capital is tapping her in a bid to combine its crypto investment expertise with traditional investment business and network.

The Amsterdam-based firm was founded by Justin Bons, who is also its investment chief, five years ago. The start-up uses fundamental analysis to invest in cryptocurrencies for the long term.

Institutional crypto managers are holding a record amount of digital assets, despite a decline in US inflows, CoinShares says

A visual representation of the digital Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is on display in front of the Bitcoin course’s graph Chesnot/Getty Images

Total assets under management held by crypto managers have reached a record $57 billion, according to digital asset investment house CoinShares.

US investors appear less keen on crypto, but European and Canadian appetite remains strong, the report shows.

Bitcoin trading volume also declined by $387 million last week, it said.

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Institutional crypto managers are now managing a record $57 billion in assets, according to digital asset investment firm CoinShares. Last week, net inflows totalled $73 million as minor outflows were offset by incoming investments, a weekly report by the company showed.

Grayscale Investments, the owner of the world’s largest bitcoin fund, still manages over three quarters of that record total, with around $44.6 billion, well ahead of CoinShares, which has the second-largest holding, with just shy of $5 billion in assets under management.

The vast majority of inflows in the latest week went into bitcoin, totaling $85 million. Ethereum’s ether token and Polkadot were left far behind in second and third place respectively, according to the report. Ether saw inflows of $8 million and Polkadot, $2 million. Volumes traded in bitcoin-based investment products eased back by $387 million to $713 million a day, compared to a daily $1.1 billion for 2021.

“This has not been reflected overall for bitcoin, where trading volumes on trusted exchanges remain at $11.8 billion per day,” CoinShares said in its weekly report.

Bitcoin’s value has declined in recent weeks and is currently trading around $54,945. It traded at a record above $61,000 earlier in March.

Crypto analysts are increasingly speaking of the potential for a steeper correction in price and some have said indicators are pointing to bitcoin being at a later stage in the bull market.

Other digital assets have followed a similar pattern in the last few months. Following the price highs that a number of digital assets reached in February and their recent volatility, there has been a decline in investor appetite, CoinShares said. However, “there seems to be a regional divide, with declining appetite from the United States and sustained appetite from Europe and Canada,” the report added.

The volatility of digital assets is something that does concern banks, regulators and governments. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell stated on Monday that cryptocurrencies are too volatile to replace the dollar and the SEC has not yet approved any bitcoin ETFs, despite the agency’s cryptocurrency commissioner stating that this has caused them difficulties.

Coinbase Users Say Crypto Start-Up Ignored Their Pleas for Help

His cautionary tale is one of dozens from Coinbase customers around the world who say that their accounts were plundered by attackers or that they were locked out of their life savings without warning or reason — and that the company failed to detect the issues and did little to help. As Coinbase prepares to go public in the next few weeks, cementing its status as one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency enterprises, its users’ experiences show how the company sometimes still struggles to address basic customer service complaints.

That raises questions for Coinbase at a crucial moment. No major cryptocurrency company has gone public before and some investors have speculated that Coinbase could be valued at as much as $100 billion. Its listing would also underline how cryptocurrencies have surged in popularity in the pandemic. The price of Bitcoin, the best-known digital currency, has broken records since November.

Coinbase’s going public is “seminal” for the cryptocurrency industry, said David Silver, a lawyer who represents digital currency investors. But he added that if the company wanted to be “the Goldman Sachs of crypto,” it “needs to maintain quality customer support.”

In a statement, Casper Sorensen, Coinbase’s vice president for customer experience, said the company was grappling with a “24/7 crypto economy, which, combined with a substantial increase in demand, has created a unique set of customer experience challenges.” To address those, the company said it had added 2,000 customer support employees in recent months and decreased wait times for help.

Coinbase added that it had never been hacked. It said 0.004 percent of its users had experienced “account takeovers” in the past year, where someone breached their devices and then gained access to their Coinbase accounts. The company said it educated its users on how to keep their accounts secure.