BitMEX CEO: Institutions Embrace Crypto Despite The Bear Market

• • Institutional appetite continues to grow in the thick of the bear market, says BitMEX CEO.
  • Bear market is marked by a prolonged drop in investment prices.

Chief executive of BitMEX, Alexander Höptner talked about institutional investors in which he said, that they still have an appetite for crypto and Ethereum. During the Token2049 conference in Singapore on September 28th, the crypto executive said that there has not been a single slowdown of institutional push into crypto during this bear market.

He also added that institutions and finance industry players in most cases use bear markets for innovation. There is a lot more pressure to deliver in the bull market, but bear markets offer the comfort of more time. He mentioned that adoption for the finance industry has a long period of time which is why institutions will be buying and holding crypto assets while the opposite can presently be said for the retail sector.

The chief executive commented that retail is actually pulling out in the bear market while institutions are still making the efforts.

I think that the institutions are making themselves ready now to provide the services and retail will come back and push it up again.

The CEO of  BITmex believes that institutions will start stacking back into Ethereum now that it has switched from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and satisfies the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) concerns.

He explained that Ethereum is the ideal blockchain which can be chosen to build stuff on and that that was the perfect event to build financial products for ESG conformity. Since ESG conformity is of great importance at the moment, institutions can offer products for a wide audience and check off one of the boxes that they have for their compliance

The $3000 amount was mentioned concerning Ethereum prices by the end of the year and and Höptner sees this as a possibility, especially now that the network is more environmentally friendly and big banks are using it. At the moment, Ethereum is trading up 3.8% over the past 24 hours at $1,336 this shows that it has a long way to go in the next coming three months.

Recently it was reported that liquid staking products such as Lido’s stETH are actually more profitable to hold and capital efficient than holding regular ETH. Overtime, they will increase in popularity while holding ETH could become of less value.