Wave Financial CEO: Institutional Adoption of Bitcoin, DeFi and NFTs Will Increase

Read the full article by Jacqualyn Melinek here

“Adoption is going to increase, we spend a lot of time talking to multi-family offices and institutions and they’re all moving in this direction rapidly,” Wave Financial Group CEO and Co-founder David Siemer told Blockworks in an interview.

Key Points:

• Siemer is no stranger to owning crypto, his holdings mostly lie in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Cardano. The Wave Financial Group Co-founder also owns 15 NFTs.

• “The most fascinating thing about bitcoin, for me, is that it is really the first asset in history that’s purely based on supply and demand,” he said

• Siemer has been what we call an early adopter of crypto and believes that adoption will continue to increase across society.

  • “I started getting involved in bitcoin in 2010, before there was even talk of cryptocurrencies, it was just bitcoin,” Siemer said. “I was really early and my friends were fundamental in the space. But it was hard to tell where it was going to go back then,” he said. In February 2012, Siemer bought bitcoin for the first time at about $8 each. Bitcoin’s price is up about 749,900% from that price. “I still have some of those early bitcoins. Obviously, I wish I could have the ones I sold back,” he joked.

• It wasn’t until 2016, where he went crypto full time. Launching his first crypto fund in 2017, then went on to start Wave Financial in 2018.

• “The more people that want it, it just goes up. Unlike Apple stock, where eventually people will say its price doesn’t make sense because their earnings don’t justify its price level, that’s just not true of crypto. At least with bitcoin and other store value coins, there’s nothing to point to other than people want it or don’t want it and that drives these parabolic moves and adoption is going to increase,” he said.

• Wave Financial recently hit about $1.5 billion in assets under management as the industry has continued to grow, according to Siemer.
  The company has also added $500 million AUM in just 45 days, up 50% from $1 billion AUM in mid-September, according to a previous statement.

  NFTs will be worth trillions

• NFTs are clearly on the rise, but Siemer predicts the space will grow 100 times over the next few years.

• “The NFT world is probably worth about $40 to $50 billion and it’s brand new,” he said. “But we think it’ll be worth trillions alone,” he added. 

• “On the collectible side, a minor part of the strategy is figuring out which NFTs are undervalued and buying them,” Siemer said. “We’ll buy hundreds of the initial drop, which is usually when you want to do it. The prices will [increase] 10x overnight sometimes,” he said.

• “Getting approval of ETFs was huge…and there’s a lot more coming there,” he said. “Those ETFs will probably gobble up $50 billion of bitcoin, which will moe the price a lot. You’re seeing a huge driver over there and way beyond that you’re seeing adoption grow pretty rapidly,” he added. 

• “We talk to a lot of large institutions, but crypto is such a foreign concept to them still. They’re still trying to get their head around it, they approach digital assets like stocks but there’s so much more to the asset class,” Siemer said. “I predict it will be a $5 trillion sector in three years and there will be bumps along the way, there will be divots and peaks, but that’s how things go in crypto,” he said.