by Rushali 
Let’s talk about “Institutional Interest” today. It has been a topic of discussion for many people with rising questions like “What is institutional interest?”, “what it has to do with the crypto space?”, why everyone keeps talking about it? And why is it so important?
Let’s try to cover those questions with some comprehensive and easy-to-understand answers. This is such a topic that can lead to detailed and technical jargon-filled discussions, but let’s try to step in a layman’s shoes and try to comprehend some of the topics.
Starting with the definition .. The term “Institutional interest” is itself made up of two words…institution and interest. An institution is an organization with a high buying capacity in terms of the money space like crypto, stocks, and bonds, and interest is what the bigger bodies or organization shows their interest in hence the term “Institutional interest”
What is its relevance in the crypto space?
Not only in the crypto space but in every space which relates to money. Think of the market from the perspective of buyers and sellers…If someone is buying something in huge quantities then the supply of that particular assets get low and the demand gets high so, organizations with huge buying capacity can lead to the increase of the price in a shorter period. For example, “Tesla” investing in bitcoins surged the price of bitcoins and lowered the supply.
Why is it so important?
As you can assume now, if a big institution is interested in a particular asset, in this case, the crypto space then the price will surge significantly, if and only they decide to buy a significant quantity or sell then vice versa.
As you can see the “Tesla bitcoin” is a classic example of institutional interest which led to a huge surge in the price of Bitcoin.
If you are following the news lately for the crypto space then you may already know that institutional interest is slowly rising for the crypto space with ETF’s and other funds getting built around it, which will lead to mass acceptance and a significant price surge, this answers the question that why everyone keeps talking about it.
But, this is not new and there are institutions and companies which are presented since the inception of bitcoins that already had funds and ETFs built around this space and have become huge by now… Let us take a look at the founder of the world’s first sole cryptocurrency investment firm, Dan Morehead, and just think about the huge net worth he holds that we will discuss at the end of this article.
Introduction
Dan Morehead is the founder of Pantera capital, it is the words first investment firm that solely invested in cryptocurrencies and built funds around the crypto space giving their clients a humungous 24000% returns on their investment. The price data of bitcoin is evidence to prove this, the crypto traded funds date back to 2013 and are considered the planets first.
Looking back at his early life, Morehead graduated from Princeton University getting a degree of BSE in Civil engineering in 1987.
During his time in the university, he was awarded the “Carmichael Prize” for his thesis.
After the completion of his education, Morehead started his career as a derivatives trader at Goldman Sachs in the year 1987 itself.
In 1989, He was appointed as the managing director of, Global portfolio group in the Bankers trust and his work included the management of equity, derivative trading, mortgage, and interest rates for the business situated in New York and Japan.
After which Morehead joined the Deutsche Bank as the global head of foreign exchange options and lead the bank from unlisted in the Euro Money survey, a global FX survey done by Euromoney magazine to the first place in the survey in a short span of just two years.
In the year 2000, Morehead started his entrepreneurial journey to be known as one of the richest personalities of the cryptocurrency space, he founded “Atriax” a forex platform that excelled in electronically executing and processing foreign exchange transactions and built a $100 million e-commerce platform with a very limited team.
Moving on to building and founding the firm Pantera capital in 2003 for which he is famously known today, Before shifting its sole focus towards bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, Pantera capital was a global macro hedge fund investment firm. After raising capital of 1.3 billion US Dollars he also launched a total of four non-macro hedge funds namely a Middle East long-only fund, a global consumer long/short equity fund, a systematic Forex only hedge fund, and an Asian long/short equity fund.
According to his profile, he has more than 25 years of experience in managing various genres of funds including hedge, macro, and none macro funds.
Also Read :
Dan Morehead Networth
The total assumed net worth of Dan Morehead stands around 200 million US Dollars which is an assumed figure and I believe it could be much more than that as he is one of the early investors and investment firm owners focussing solely on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies since 2013(one of the earliest) the bitcoin price surge data itself tells a different story. What is your take on this?.
