$22B hedge fund Point72 reportedly searching for a “head of crypto”

Reports suggest that Steve Cohen’s Point72 hedge fund is searching for a “head of crypto” as the firm weighs up its options before entering the crypto market.

New York billionaire Steven Cohen’s hedge fund Point72 Asset Management, is reportedly searching for a “head of crypto.”

Cohen, the 65-year-old dubbed the “Hedge Fund King”, founded Point72 in 1992 and it has approximately $22.1 billion worth of assets under management. The investor also owns the New York Mets Major League Baseball team.

The Street reported it has spoken to sources in the know who claim Point72 is seeking to hire a head of crypto, as the firm gears up to enter the crypto sector.

If accurate it fits with other signals emerging from the fund. Cohen recently stated in an interview with macro research firm founder, Jawad Mian, that “I’m fully converted to crypto,” and added that “I have an old saying at the poker table, you got to pay to learn. There’s no way around it. You can talk all you want, but you’ve got to get in the game.”

Point72 hasn’t specifically revealed what its foray into crypto would look like, telling its investors in a client note in May that, “It’s too early to say what paths we will ultimately pursue and when.”

However, the firm noted that “we are exploring opportunities around blockchain technology and its transformative and disruptive capabilities,” and added that:

“We would be remiss to ignore a now $2 trillion cryptocurrency market.”

Cohen has made a small play already, with Fortune reporting on June 13 that his venture capital firm “Cohen Private Ventures” invested an undisclosed amount into Autonomous Partners — an up and coming hedge fund that acquires crypto and equity stakes in blockchain-based companies.

Interestingly, Point72 already has a small but concrete affiliation to crypto exchange Coinbase. Last month it sublet a 30,000 square foot office to Coinbase for its New York office at Related Companies’ 55 Hudson Yards.

Point72 is also a big investor in Melvin Capital, the hedge fund that famously took a 53% loss from short positions on GameStop (GME) at the beginning of this year, during the r/wallstreetbets pump and dump incident.

Point72 had a total of $1 billion invested in the firm before the GME drama, and provided an influx of cash to the tune of $750 million, to help stabilize the fund in the aftermath.

from https://ift.tt/2TqWKDF
https://ift.tt/3Ael0t7

Comments

DeFi isn’t dead, it just needs to fix these 3 critical problems

It’s been a rough year for DeFi, and it may not get any better until projects focus more on security, regulation and usability. The persistent challenges decentralized finance face have been well documented by a handful of analysts and the recent collapse of the Terra ecosystem re-enforced the fact that something is critically wrong with DeFi. I think DeFi today is completely broken for 99% of the population. The promise of a more transparent financial system has been overtaken by greed. UST/LUNA is just the latest in a string of bad developments: — Peter Yang (@petergyang) May 11, 2022 Let's take a look at what experts say DeFi needs to do in order to have another revival. Improved usability To date, the promise of open and uncensored access to a global decentralized financial system has been largely hampered by the complicated interface, confusing multi-step staking processes and lack of clarity surrounding the yields on various tokens. What do you thi...

ENS DAO delegates offer perspective on DAO governance and decentralized identity

AlphaWallet CEO and Spruce co-founder talk about their roles as contributors to the Ethereum Name Service following the project's recent airdrop. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, formed a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, for the ENS community. Cointelegraph spoke to two ENS DAO delegates who applied for the opportunity to represent the community and stay involved in the decision making process: Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet, an open source Ethereum wallet, and Gregory Rocco, co-founder of Spruce, a decentralized ID and data toolkit for developers. Zhang spoke about his experience as an external contributor to ENS and an early supporter since 2018. Zhang initially sought to help ENS by offering Alpha Wallet as a user-friendly tool for resolving .eth names and cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Essentially, if a user inputs an .eth name in the AlphaWallet, it will show the wallet address, and vice versa using reverse resolution. Alpha...

National Futures Association adds rules for members handling digital assets

The CFTC-linked self-regulatory organization (SRO) has disclosure rules for members engaging in activities with BTC and ETH; now, standards of conduct are being added. The National Futures Association (NFA), the United States self-regulatory organization for derivatives markets, has issued a new compliance rule addressing members’ conduct. The new rule complements requirements issued in 2018. The NFA has “well over 100” members that engage in activities with digital asset commodities, but no way to address fraud or misconduct committed by those members, the organization explained to secretary of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Christopher Kirkpatrick in a Feb. 28 letter as it submitted the proposed new rule for approval. The new rule is modelled on the NFA’s antifraud rules for exchange traded futures and swaps transaction and retail foreign exchange. The NFA is the only registered self-regulatory organization that has delegated authority from the CFTC, giving it a...

Crypto Coin Search

Search This Blog