Henrik Andersson, the CIO of Apollo Capital, a company that manages crypto asset funds, thinks that institutions may soon “flip” their conservative views on crypto.
The crypto fund manager in Melbourne told Asian Trade that institutional interest in crypto has been slow to pick up, especially in Australia, but that there are a lot of players waiting for the right time to strike.
Andersson said that big institutional investors in Australia, like retirement funds (also called “superannuation funds”), are still not very interested in digital assets.
“We’re just getting started. So, yes, I talk to a lot of family offices and smaller institutions in Australia. The big super funds for industries are not there yet.”
“From their point of view, they still have a lot to learn. So I think it will still take some time,” he said.
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Apollo Capital is a fund manager that focuses on giving family offices and institutional investors access to cryptocurrency investment opportunities.One of its newest funds is the Apollo Capital Frontier Fund, which focuses on infrastructure for nonfungible tokens (NFTs), decentralised finance (DeFi), and multi-chains.
When asked what needs to happen for institutional sentiment to change, Andersson said that this will “flip” when big players start making more substantial moves in the space.
“No one wants to do something like this for the first time. Because if you’re the first person and something goes wrong, it could hurt your career. At some point, it will be the other way around,” Andersson said.
“At some point, people don’t want to miss out when prices go up. And if other people are investing, it will be bad for your career if you don’t.”
In Australia, big banks like ANZ, NAB, and Commonwealth Bank (CBA) have already started to get involved with digital assets.
“Some of the biggest banks in Australia are showing interest in digital assets. So that’s a great thing to see,” he said.
Last year, CBA was the first big bank in the country to say that it would offer cryptocurrency services through its mobile banking app. It later put those plans on hold, saying that it was still waiting for the new government to make its rules clear.
Others have moved forward with stablecoin trading and tokenizing assets.
Even though the market is down, big banks like Singapore’s DBS Bank are still growing their digital assets business. At the same time, major investment banks have been expanding their coverage of the cryptocurrency space.
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“All of the world’s biggest investment banks are writing research reports about the crypto space. From Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, JP Morgan, and others, a lot of big banks are involved. So, there is still a lot of interest from these types of institutional players in the space,” he said.
“So, even though it seems like things are moving slowly right now, once the mood changes, we’ll see the first players making investments, and things can change very quickly.”
Irfan Ahmad, the Asia Pacific digital lead for the bank’s crypto unit State Street Digital, told the Sydney Morning Herald this week that institutional investors are still interested in blockchain and digital assets, even though it is currently crypto winter.