In August, it was reported that asset management firm Brevan Howard raised over $1 billion to invest in the crypto industry.
In this episode of The Scoop, Brevan Howard’s Co-Heads of Ventures Peter Johnson and Colleen Sullivan break down their investment thesis and explain what segments of the crypto market they believe are seeing the most interest from existing brands.
While traditional financial institutions are slowly moving their way into the crypto ecosystem, Sullivan points out that many traditional brands have already fully entered crypto via NFTs, metaverse experiences, and gaming:
“Look at Goldman, JPMorgan, Citi, they’re all involved in crypto to a certain extent — not to the degree we would have thought — but the institutions that are here are the Gucci’s, the Nike’s, the Tiffany’s, the Dolce and Gabbana, Balmain, Balenciaga.”
Blockchain gaming is one subset of the crypto market that Brevan Howard has recently been allocating to; just last week the firm co-led a $40 million Series A for Web3 gaming startup Horizon Blockchain Games.
Outside of gaming, the digital asset opportunities Brevan Howard is looking to invest in relate to practical use cases. As Johnson explains,
“What we’re really excited about right now is moving beyond just speculative trading and where are the real world use cases that we’re seeing crypto start to gain adoption.”