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The Matt Hougan has joined the Bitwise Asset Management Inc as the Vice President of research and development after serving for about 15 years as the CEO at the educational company in the Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). After working in the ETF industry, Hougan is crossing over to the cryptocurrency world as he predicts the potential transformational investment opportunities available in the space.
Last year, Bitwise reported a passively managed index fund that encompasses the popular cryptocurrencies by the market capitation. Since the fund rebalances every month, all the remaining assets are usually held in the cold storage. The firm also raised about $4 million in the seed funding to develop a team that will develop new products for investment. The startup is planning to use the funds to hire more employees.
According to Hougan, the individual applications such as bitcoin and Ethereum are like gold which is worth over $3 trillion market. It’s equal to a multitrillion-dollar opportunity and each utility tokens’ market are substantial. However, since the prices are highly volatile, investors should consider taking long-term investments and diversify their assets widely so as to spread the risks.
The cryptocurrency market has significantly grown more than 25 times in the past one year to above $500 billion, with bitcoin alone making up for a third of the sales volume according to the CoinMarketCap report.
Currently, most of the investors for Bitwise are US-based the firm is planning to expand to Cayman Island to accommodate the overseas investors. Spencer Bogart, a partner at Blockchain Capital, one of the investors at the startup said that it’s exciting to have leaders such as Hougan join the talented team at Bitwise.
The investors have increasingly demanded access to the rules-based beta alternatives. Hence Hougan brings the needed expertise especially in indexing, exchange-traded products, and the institutional research in software, that will help increase Bitwise sales volumes and improve the services to the users.