Morgan Creek Digital to Raise $250m, Balancing BlockFi’s Bailout from FTX

Bailing out the crypto lending platform BlockFi has become one of the most significant endeavours for early investors in the company such as Morgan Creek Digital.

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According to an exclusive Coindesk report, the crypto investment manager has been wooing investors in a bid to raise $250 million to counter the offer from FTX Derivatives Exchange.

The Coindesk report was centred on a leaked call made by Morgan Creek Digital’s managing partner, Mark Yusko.

Per the reviewed call, Yusko was learned to have explained the details of the BlockFi and FTX’s offer, which he said, if finalized, may cost early investors like Morgan Creek their investments as FTX can acquire the firm at almost zero cost. To prevent this from happening, Yusko solicited immediate funding from investors to make a counter offer that could at least benefit the investment firm should BlockFi declare bankruptcy amidst the encompassing crypto winter.

Yusko noted that BlockFi co-founders had to pitch tents with FTX because the exchange was the only one that offered a bailout in which clients’ funds are protected. Additional details of the deal are notably being discussed at the moment. 

“We are still negotiating the terms of the deal and cannot share more information at this time,” a BlockFi spokesperson told CoinDesk on Saturday. “We anticipate sharing more on the terms of the deal with the public at a later date.” 

Bailouts are now becoming a major lifeline for the crypto startups that are most hit by the ongoing crypto market meltdown. With Celsius Network also on the brink of declaring bankruptcy, Goldman Sachs is reportedly raising funds to acquire the embattled crypto lender should it come to that. 

Mark Yusko is flexible in his bid to pilot Morgan Creek into becoming a part-owner of BlockFi, and he said he is open to a joint takeover with Sam Bankman-Fried if it comes to that.

 

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Morgan Creek Digital to Balance BlockFi’s Bailout from FTX

Bailing out the crypto lending platform BlockFi has become one of the most significant endeavours for early investors in the company such as Morgan Creek Digital.

Webp.net-resizeimage (52).jpg

According to an exclusive Coindesk report, the crypto investment manager has been wooing investors in a bid to raise $250 million to counter the offer from FTX Derivatives Exchange.

The Coindesk report was centred on a leaked call made by Morgan Creek Digital’s managing partner, Mark Yusko.

Per the reviewed call, Yusko was learned to have explained the details of the BlockFi and FTX’s offer, which he said, if finalized, may cost early investors like Morgan Creek their investments as FTX can acquire the firm at almost zero cost. To prevent this from happening, Yusko solicited immediate funding from investors to make a counter offer that could at least benefit the investment firm should BlockFi declare bankruptcy amidst the encompassing crypto winter.

Yusko noted that BlockFi co-founders had to pitch tents with FTX because the exchange was the only one that offered a bailout in which clients’ funds are protected. Additional details of the deal are notably being discussed at the moment. 

“We are still negotiating the terms of the deal and cannot share more information at this time,” a BlockFi spokesperson told CoinDesk on Saturday. “We anticipate sharing more on the terms of the deal with the public at a later date.” 

Bailouts are now becoming a major lifeline for the crypto startups that are most hit by the ongoing crypto market meltdown. With Celsius Network also on the brink of declaring bankruptcy, Goldman Sachs is reportedly raising funds to acquire the embattled crypto lender should it come to that. 

Mark Yusko is flexible in his bid to pilot Morgan Creek into becoming a part-owner of BlockFi, and he said he is open to a joint takeover with Sam Bankman-Fried if it comes to that.

 

Image source: Shutterstock

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Bitcoin Is The Best Form Of Money, Says Morgan Creek Capital CEO

Bitcoin is the best form of money and will be the base layer of the internet of value, said Mark Yusko, CEO of Morgan Creek Capital, in an interview with Cointelegraph. Yusko shared his thoughts on Bitcoin, gold, cryptocurrencies, and the barriers to worldwide adoption.

Bitcoin will eat all of gold’s market cap, in Yusko’s opinion, driving the BTC price north of $500,000. But in the short term, bitcoin is set to increase five-fold as it draws in the “liquid” supply of gold, which is valued at around $4 trillion. As a result, Yusko explained, BTC could be worth $250,000 within the next couple of years.

“Financial services is far bigger than information and media and commerce,” he said, referring to the massive market that Bitcoin could tap into as “the best form of money.” Yusko compared the “internet of value” to the internet, pointing out that it will be built in layers similar to its predecessor. “Bitcoin will be the base layer,” he said.

“You have TCP/IP, which we are using to communicate right now, and you have SMTP for email, HTTP for web,” Yusko explained in the interview. “And we will have it similarly in the internet of value.”

The hedge fund manager highlighted that Bitcoin would power the internet of value by being its “base layer,” but said “other things” would also play an important role. Yusko likened SMTP with Filecoin and HTTP with Ethereum. Besides file sharing and an application layer, Yusko opined that other tokens would also play a role. He cited gaming, earning, and paying for content.

Yusko fails to realize that nearly all of those use cases could be built on top of Lightning, and some already are. There are gaming options that leverage Lightning, like Zebedee and streaming money services such as Sphinx Chat.

Natively built on Bitcoin, Lightning extends the base layer to encompass a broader range of use cases while abiding by the same rules. Users get the assurance that they are transacting on the most secure and robust network available, which is not true when using the other projects Yusko cited.

Although not perfect, like all software, Lightning has an immense potential that is just starting to be tapped. With the activation of Taproot in November, the second-layer network will enjoy more flexibility and privacy, as the soft fork is set to enhance Bitcoin’s smart-contract capabilities and allow more complex transactions to “blend in” with the simpler ones.

The slowly but surely advancements of Bitcoin and its layers will obsolete nearly all “altcoins” by rendering their value propositions redundant. There is a need for interoperability, something that is core to the internet but would be impossible by having one blockchain per use case. In the internet, layers build on top of each other, which is only possible in finance if built on top of “the best form of money”  Bitcoin. That’s where Lightning and the applications built on top of it come in.

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BTC could trade for $250K within five years: Morgan Creek Capital CEO

Morgan Creek Capital Management founder and CEO believes Bitcoin’s next market cycle could see the asset rival gold by market capitalization and trading for more than $200,000.

While appearing on CNBC’s Trading Nation on May 9, Mark Yusko compared the rapid adoption of Bitcoin to the growth of FAANG companies — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.

“This is a network and networks grow in an exponential way. This is the fastest network in history to a trillion dollars of value, right on the heels of the FAANGs that took, you know, 15 to 20 years depending on which one you look at.”

Yusko’s price prediction is based on his assumption that Bitcoin will rival gold by “monetary value” – a concept derived from the gold standard where a country’s currency or fiat has a value directly linked to gold. He stated: “If gold’s monetary value is $4 trillion, then digital gold should move up to that total.”

With BTC changing hands for roughly $59,000 and Bitcoin’s market cap at roughly $1.1 trillion at the time of writing, Yusko’s prediction suggests Bitcoin could trade for at least $235,000 in future.

The investment manager predicted Bitcoin will become the base layer protocol for the Internet of value, likening Bitcoin to Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP — the standard protocol allowing computers to connect and share data across the internet.

When asked about other protocols or crypto-assets such as Ethereum, Litecoin, and Dogecoin – which have all reached their all-time highs over the past couple of days – he stated there is room for more. However, not a fan of DOGE, Yusko added:

“There are thousands of coins and DOGE is in that category that really are useless, they’re just utility tokens that have no underlying value or use case and they’ll eventually disappear.”

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading 1.7% higher on the day at $59,200, Ethereum was at an all-time high above $4,000, but DOGE had crashed after tagging new record highs following a mention from Elon Musk on the Saturday Night Live show.