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“That’s the opposite of what happens with most stocks,” the mutual fund legend added.

Bitcoin may not be “digital gold” just yet. But, with institutions accepting the business case and the price rising, it’s well on the way.

Also: Grayscale reports an a rise in participation from pensions while Ripple’s Garlinghouse reveals he attempted to settle charges with the SEC ahead of its XRP suit.

Augmentum Fintech, a £193m London-based investment fund listed on the London Stock Exchange, will begin investing in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols through a new partnership.

The company has allocated an undisclosed sum of money to ParaFi Capital, the San Francisco-based investment firm that specializes in blockchain and DeFi.

Tim Levene, chief executive of Augmentum, told The Block the figure is in the “low single-digit millions”, but added that the fund has the flexibility to expand that position over time if ParaFi delivers.

“We’ve allocated some money to them to deploy and then over time our expectation is that there will be co-invest opportunities through that fund,” he added.

Augmentum’s portfolio already features a wide variety of fintech disruptors, from identification verification firm OnFido, to digital banks Tide, Monese and Zopa, the last of which was also the world’s first-ever peer-to-peer lender. ParaFi, meanwhile, has backed in a number of well-known DeFi protocols, including Uniswap, MakerDAO and Compound.

In a blog post announcing the partnership on January 8, Augmentum said the two firms would co-invest in DeFi development teams in Europe and the United States “prior to public launch”.

“ParaFi will invest at the pre-seed stage, before public tokens are launched… We think that there’s massive opportunity if you can get in at that stage,” said Ellen Logan, investment associate at Augmentum.

Augmentum ordinarily invests directly in startups, rather than allocating funds to other investment vehicles – which, of course, engenders additional fees – but Levene said DeFi is “a special case in that it’s an emerging sector that requires a huge depth of understanding”.  

“As Europe starts to look at this space, it’s clear that in what I would call traditional venture this would be an area that is quite unusual at the moment,” he told The Block. 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

They call it the charitable-industrial complex: a system where money for development, for humanitarian needs, and for improving the lives of billions is controlled through a top-down process, run by U.S. charities and shaped by U.S. tax rules and regulations.

With BTC hitting another record high of $41K plus a look at the ongoing rise and where it could end, CoinDesk’s Market’s Daily is back with the latest crypto news roundup.

Quick Take

• Though it was known that the digital yuan is supposed to come with hardware wallets, the latest Shanghai test offered a glimpse at a prototype. 
• The hardware wallets can be more private and and user-friendly than mobile app wallets, according to local news reports

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Hive last had a $1 billion market value in November 2017.

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