Billionaire Nixon’s Family Office Plans to Boost Crypto Bets

(Bloomberg) --

Billionaire Simon Nixon wants to bolster his crypto investments as more of the world’s ultra-rich embrace digital assets.
 
His family office -- Seek Capital -- is aiming to increase its “allocation to crypto as we feel it is an important area for the future,” Adam Proctor, a managing director for Nixon’s London-based firm said in a statement. It’s looking to hire an analyst to focus on the sector, said Proctor, who joined this year from Citigroup Inc.’s private bank. 

Read more: ex-Citi banker Proctor to join U.K. billionaire’s family office

Family office interest in cryptocurrencies has been sustained this year even as prices have swung wildly. Bitcoin, for instance, has rebounded more than 50% since mid-July. Other coins — including Ethereum, Cardano’s ADA and Dogecoin — have also risen driven by signs of mainstream acceptance.

A recent Goldman Sachs Group Inc. survey found that nearly half the family offices it does business with want to add digital currencies to their stable of investments, with the closely held firms seeing crypto as a possible hedge for higher inflation and prolonged low interest rates. 

Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego revealed in November that he’s put a chunk of his liquid funds in Bitcoin. Michael Novogratz and Christian Angermayer’s family office are founders of Cryptology Asset Group, which pledged in June to allocate $100 million over the next two years to crypto-related funds. Novogratz has a net worth of about $5 billion, largely due to shares in his crypto investment bank Galaxy Digital Holdings more than doubling this year through Wednesday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Nixon, 54, co-founded price-comparison site Moneysupermarket.com as a mortgage-listings company in 1993. He finished selling his shares in the company in 2016. He manages more than $1 billion of personal assets in the tech sector, according to his London-based venture capital firm, Seek Ventures. 

Surging fortunes from tech billionaires such as Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt have helped to spark a global boom in the number of family offices. A 2019 estimate by researcher Campden Wealth valued family office assets at almost $6 trillion globally.

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