Despite the market fumes, asset managers rely on crypto

Well -known asset managers push into digital assets and find new ways to monetize the interest of investors, even if trade volume and prices for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have broken into.

The ABRN, which was listed in the FTSE 100, was the youngest investment house this week, which dared to make the leap by acquiring a participation in Archax, a regulated British stock exchange for digital assets. The participation will provide the fund manager a seat on the board with a wealth of £ 508 billion and represents a bet that Archax's technology will underpin future trade in funds, shares and other securities.

The investment of ABRDN, which was not previously reported, is made, since Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager, not only announced plans for a spot bitcoin trust for institutional investors, but also agreed to connect his technology platform Aladdin with the CryptoBörse Coinbase. The latter step should make the way to the 82,000 investment experts who use Aladdin to offer customers access to Bitcoin.

In the meantime, in the meantime, Charles Schwab, the US broker and investment group, has launched a stock market-traded fund last week who aims to enable investors to engagement in crypto without actually buying the currencies. And the British asset manager Schroders bought a participation in the digital asset manager forteus in July.

While Fidelity has been offering storage services for digital assets for almost five years and added a Bitcoin option to its retirement offers in April, the activities this summer signal a broader acceptance of digital assets, said market analysts.

"Great asset managers begin to consider this as a real investment," said Chris Brendler, Senior Research Analyst at Da Davidson. "I think it is an important data point in relation to traditional asset management companies that accept what has really been made almost ridiculous for years."

Blackrock founder Larry Fink used to be one of the skeptics and joked in 2017 that "Bitcoin only shows how great the demand for money laundering is in the world".

The new digital offers come after digital assets have experienced a brutal market sale that reduced the entire market capitalization of around 3.2 trillion US dollars to less than $ 1 trillion in November.

But Charley Cooper, Managing Director of Blockchain company R3 and former top employee of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, argues that the fact that you have continued is a trust. "Deals like this are not thrown together at the last minute. These things have been working for months, if not years.. It is not as if they had decided to do it spontaneously."

This is what concerns consumer groups. "Just because top companies want to earn with a little new money, it is far from good," said Dennis Kelleher, head of Better Markets, a representative for investors based in Washington. "This volatility would usually be a red flag warning."

The great variety of businesses with digital assets reflect the aspiring nature of the investment class and the regulatory skepticism towards retail products that invest directly in Bitcoin. Blackrock avoided this by offering institutional investors a private fund, and the Schwab ETF invests in listed companies that aim to benefit from the offer of services for crypto investors or from the underlying digital blockchain-Ledger technology.

"We know that it is a speculative system, but we have identified it as a long -term trend," said David Botseet, head of the equity product management in the asset management division of Charles Schwab.

ABRDN's participation in Archax is a similar bet. Archax was founded in 2018 by the former hedge fund managers Graham Rodford, Andrew Flatt and Matthew Pollard and offers institutional investors a platform for trading in cryptocurrencies and tokenized securities such as fractional parts of stocks of companies. Over time, ABRDN hopes to achieve "significant income" by gaining access to its funds in token-form and less easily manageable assets such as private Debt, private equity and buildings on the stock exchange.

"In our view, the next disruptive event will be the transition from electronic trade to digital stock exchanges and the trade in digital securities," said Russell Barlow, Global Head of Alternatives at ABRDN, which has contributed significantly to the end of the deal. "At the beginning, we will put us in a really strong position."

At the beginning of this week, Abrdn recorded a loss of £ 320 million in the first half of the year, since an outflow of customers pressed the managed and managed assets down.