Hedge fund billionaire and New York Mets owner Steve Cohen said he owns “very little” bitcoin, though he didn’t specify its value. “My son is really into it, and he had me play around and try to figure out how to transact on Coinbase,” Cohen told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Wednesday. The chairman and CEO of Point72 Asset Management, which has about $32 billion in assets under management, added that he doesn’t have strong opinions about the digital asset class. Still, he appears to be following along with investors across the world who have been trying to understand how to value bitcoin and whether it belongs in a portfolio. “I don’t follow it that closely, it’s not what I do,” he said. “There’s certainly an element of the population that believes in it.” “Maybe it’s the new gold,” he added. “It’s a new instrument, that’s the argument … [it’s] really hard to know.” BTC.CM= 1Y mountain Bitcoin (BTC) over the past year Cohen also made the point that bitcoin represents just a slice of the broader market of cryptocurrencies and the opportunities for their underlying blockchain technology. “Bitcoin is separate from crypto … ultimately, it’s about use case – will crypto develop use cases?” he said. “So bitcoin’s interesting, but it’s just a piece of that whole ecosystem.” The venture capital arm of Cohen’s fund, Point72 Ventures, has made investments in a handful of crypto companies, including the data provider Messari, crypto infrastructure platform Zero Hash, as well as crypto and foreign exchange trading platform 24 Exchange. In 2021, after the peak of the bull market fueled by interest in NFTs, the firm said it had a long-term view on the securitization of various digital assets not currently under the SEC realm, including some cryptocurrencies and NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.
