Iati Damti
Co-founder of Leverate, a world leader in technology for FX brokers. Currently based in Hong Kong as CEO Asia Pacific.
In January 2016, an anonymous user posted the following question on Quora: Does it still make any sense to buy Bitcoin in 2016? The price of Bitcoin then was below $400.
My answer then was yes, but it wasn’t that I was religious about Bitcoin or had tools to analyze it quantitatively. To me, Bitcoin was just a very promising early stage startup.
All VC investors know that it’s the early stage where the big multiples are (alongside the high risk, of course). No matter how bullish you are about Facebook’s future today- you can never hope to match the 800x return of Accel Partners who invested in Facebook’s series A.
Back then, I theorized that Bitcoin was likely to disappear or lose value over time. But I thought it made a fantastic investment for the small chance it would ever reach the financial mainstream. Real estate investors hardly relate to this “funny math”, but for venture capitalists it’s the bread and butter.
The year of Bitcoin
Fast forward to 2017. Bitcoin has smashed other asset classes this year, surging almost 400% since January. Thousands of “Bitcoin millionaires” gave rise to a wave of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO’s) and sent more than $2bn in funding to hundreds of new crypto projects. While Bitcoin accounts for more than 50% of value of all “crypto assets”, the market currently sees about $5bn in trading volume per day across 1,100 currencies and tokens