HODLing $10 Billion of Bitcoin in Swiss Military Bunker | Bloomberg Reports

Bloomberg Reported recently that an Argentine entrepreneur Wences Casares in the past several years has been persuading Silicon Valley wealthy people that Bitcoin is the only global currency of the future, so they have to buy and keep in safe, so he’s the man to safeguard it. Xapo is his startup to make that happen.


His startup, Xapo, has built a network of underground vaults on five continents, including one in a decommissioned Swiss military bunker. Two Xapo clients said it houses roughly $10 billion of Bitcoin. Another person close to the venture called the figure an accurate approximation. Bitcoin’s price, after all, is hardly steady.

“Everyone who isn’t keeping keys themselves is keeping them with Xapo,” said Ryan Radloff of CoinShares, which has more than $500 million of Bitcoin stored at Xapo. “You couldn’t pay me to keep it with a bank.”

“They’re the first folks who recognized custodial and security functions would be key,” said Hoffman, whose venture capital firm Greylock Partners led a $20 million investment in Xapo in 2014, a couple of years after Casares persuaded him to buy his first Bitcoin. “He made the pitch in the morning and in the afternoon I called him with an offer.”

Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in recent years has spurred the proliferation of rival currencies, such as Ethereum and Ripple that also have multibillion-dollar valuations. Yet Xapo only safeguards Bitcoin because of Casares’s belief that it alone will succeed. Such dogmatism has seen Xapo turn away customers looking to store rival currencies.

Other purists say ventures such as Xapo have no place in the Bitcoin ecosystem, slowing down what’s supposed to be a seamless transfer.

Xapo’s top brass wrestle with that paradox, too.

“It’s a subject we discuss a lot, and we believe Bitcoin won’t reach the mainstream if people have to hold their own private keys,” Rogers said. “It’s a pretty high hurdle technically to be your own bank with lots of security.”

Tags: technology, bloomberg, economy, business ,btc, bitcoin news, bitcoin, xapo, HODLing

Mohsen Daemi
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