Barry Silbert is an American businessman from Maryland who graduated from Atlanta Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in 1998 with a bachelor of business administration in finance. He first pursued a career in investment banking, sold his stock trading platform Second Market to Nasdaq in 2015, then started a profession in cryptocurrency.
Silbert first bought Bitcoin in 2012 and soon became one of the earliest and most enthusiastic cryptocurrency investors. In 2015, he founded Digital Currency Group, a partnership of five crypto and blockchain-focused subsidiaries: Genesis, Grayscale, Coindesk, Foundry and Luno.
DCG has also invested in more than 200 crypto startups in 15 countries through its subsidiaries, including BitGo, BitPay, Circle, Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple Labs, TradeBlock and Xapo.
His crypto investment giant Grayscale Investments manages $28 billion worth of digital assets, including Bitcoin, Ether and others. The company created the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust in 2013, the first publicly quoted security deriving its value from the price of Bitcoin, with an overall value of $40 billion in assets under management. Grayscale has reported holding roughly 3.44% of all Bitcoin in circulation.
At the end of 2020, DCG expanded further into trading and mining by acquiring global cryptocurrency exchange Luno and Foundry, a digital currency mining and staking advisory company.
In 2021, Silbert’s companies consolidated their market value and expanded operations into decentralized finance. Foundry launched FoundryX, a new marketplace that matches buyers and sellers of Bitcoin mining rigs, which completed over $125 million in sales in 2021.
In November, DCG sold $700 million worth of shares on secondary markets to SoftBank and Google parent Alphabet’s venture capital branch. The deal brought the company to $10 billion in value.
Silbert’s passion for individuals’ privacy led him to acquire an additional $85 million of Zcash, an asset already part of his portfolio.
DCG will be relocating its headquarters to Stamford, Connecticut. The move will bring hundreds of jobs to the region in the next five years and set the ground for the municipality to become a crypto city.
Silbert will likely continue his mission to grow cryptocurrency adoption for institutions and retail investors. DCG simply reflects his vision and, in 2022, will be looking at building a world-class investment vehicle by making critical hires in fundamental and quantitative analysis.
One of the main challenges Silbert will be facing is the approval of a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. The first Bitcoin-linked fund hit the New York Stock Exchange in October, becoming the quickest ETF to reach that threshold. The ProShares ETF topped $1 billion in assets in just two days.
Distinct from current Bitcoin ETFs, a spot Bitcoin ETF tracks the actual Bitcoin price instead of betting on a future price. Silbert filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to convert the Bitcoin Trust into a spot ETF, and the cryptocurrency community wonders if 2022 will finally be the year of the first spot Bitcoin ETF launch.
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