Hedge Fund Billionaire Bill Ackman Shares Optimism About Crypto’s Future Amid FTX Fallout

Jimmy Aki
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Billionaire investor Bill Ackman is optimistic about the future of digital assets, despite the FTX calamity.

Crypto Is Here to Stay

Over the weekend, Ackman shared a Twitter thread where he discussed the crypto market in light of recent events. In it, Ackman, who leads the $18.5 billion hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, explained that he remains bullish on the crypto market and believes in the long-term potential for digital assets.

Ackman began his thread by pointing out that he had initially been skeptical about cryptocurrencies, a view shared by his mentor, Warren Buffett. However, after studying the market, the billionaire has come to see that digital assets have great potential for revolutionizing the business and technology landscape.

He added that he still believes that crypto has the potential to benefit society immensely, although there is a need for the market to wipe out “bad actors.”

To do this, Ackman has advocated for strong and progressive regulations to curb some of the negative excesses that crypto currently enables. The billionaire also added that legitimate players in the industry should be able to help identify some of these bad actors and call them out. If this isn’t done, the hedge fund titan believes there is a risk of slowing down progress made by the industry and inviting harsher regulations from authorities.

Ackman has long been an advocate for regulatory clarity in the crypto market. Earlier this year, he called on New York City Mayor Eric Adams and State Governor Kathy Hochul to look into the Digital Currency License required for any crypto company to operate in New York.

Known as the BitLicense, the regulation has come under significant scrutiny for its implications and oversight requirements on crypto companies looking to set up in New York. Several companies have also rallied against it, as well as the policies being put up by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS).

As Ackman explained in a tweet, the BitLicense could rob New York of the opportunity to become a crypto center of innovation.

Time to Put Laws in Place

The billionaire’s comments on Sunday came in the wave of the FTX debacle, which continues to unravel even after two weeks of shocking revelations. The company, which had been the second-largest crypto exchange barely two weeks ago, suddenly collapsed under the weight of a liquidity crunch after reports surfaced about its financial dealings with Alameda Research, a quant trading shop founded by FTX’s chief executive, Sam Bankman-Fried.

Over the past two weeks, the fallout from FTX’s collapse has continued. The company’s bankruptcy filing has revealed that it owes about $3.1 billion to its top 50 creditors alone.

Additional revelations from last week confirmed that the company had about a million creditors, a significant increase from early estimates of about 100,000 from Bankman-Fried.

The exchange founder has been outed from the company and appears to have gone dark as efforts to locate him and several other members of FTX’s top brass have proved abortive.

Still, as the saga unravels, calls for additional regulatory enforcement on the crypto market have been growing.

Last week, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Commissioner, Summer Mersinger, said at the Texas Blockchain Summit that the time has come for crypto regulation to take a pole position in discussions between her agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

At the same time, businessman and politician Andrew Yang has also asked agencies to be more active in providing common sense regulations for the market.

About Jimmy Aki PRO INVESTOR

Based in the UK, Jimmy is an economic researcher with outstanding hands-on and heads-on experience in Macroeconomic finance analysis, forecasting and planning. He has honed his skills having worked cross-continental as a finance analyst, which gives him inter-cultural experience. He currently has a strong passion for regulation and macroeconomic trends as it allows him peek under the global bonnet to see how the world works.