BTC, ETH Slide Lower Despite Insurers’ USD 100m Bitcoin Buy & Ether ETF

Tim Alper
Last updated: | 2 min read

The crypto community has been buoyed as – despite sliding bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH) prices – two major breakthroughs were reached for both tokens.

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At pixel time (09:03 UTC), BTC trades at USD 17,883 and is down by 3% in a day and 8% in a week, while ETH is down by almost 4% to USD 545. Its price declined by 11% in a week.

Last night, the news broke that America’s Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance (also known as MassMutual) has purchased USD 100m worth of bitcoin to add to its general investment fund – on the same day as the world’s first-ever ethereum exchange-traded fund (ETF) made its market debut in Canada.

Per Bloomberg, MassMuttual’s holdings are now 0.04% held in BTC, but the firm also moved to also snap up a USD 5m minority equity stake in NYDIG, a Stone Ridge-run subsidiary firm that provides crypto services to institutional investors.

Meanwhile, across the border, The Ether Fund, an ETH-backed offering organized by crypto investment management firm 3iQ finally listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, after raising some USD 76.5m prior to listing.

Although the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) announced that there had been a hiccup with a temporary halt prior to the start of trading.

But after around two hours, trading did eventually resume, reaching a high of 11.48 dollars per share – with 345,331 shares traded on its first official day on the market.

The ETH backing the token is being held by the Gemini Exchange’s crypto custody subsidiary, Gemini Custody. Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss wrote on Twitter,

“Huge news for Ethereans. […]To the moon!”

Reacting to the bitcoin news, journalist Laura Shin took to Twitter to state that the development was “a big deal” as the company “isn’t and hasn’t been an advocate for bitcoin.” She added that the move “seems like a sober, non-ideological move” on MassMutual’s part.

Another observer said that the move was a “woke” measure, pointing out that it was telling that MassMutual was “an insurance company whose only job has been to manage risk for 170 years” had decided to take such a bold bitcoin plunge.

A redditor, meanwhile, wrote that investments of this kind were one very rare, but “it seems new large investors are entering on a daily basis now.”

And one more optimistic pundit claimed that with BTC and ETH experiencing so many “watershed moments” it was only a matter of time before “Amazon, Apple and/or some other behemoth is going to get involved in bitcoin.”

“The big boys are putting their funds into bitcoin as a hedge against being called Neanderthals who missed the crypto boat. And let’s not forget that they all have millennial kids or grandkids rooting them on,” Tania Modic, the managing member of Western Investments Capital LLC, her investment family office, told Bloomberg.
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