The Japanese investment giant Softbank is immersing its feet fingers in cryptography by supporting a new Bitcoin investment vehicle (BTC), twenty -one capital, along with Tether, Bitfinex and Cantor Fitzgerald.
For some, the SoftBank group, which has $ 308.7 billion of assets under administration, having an interest in Bitcoin is a welcome development and another sign of the growing institutional adoption of cryptography. After all, SoftBank works more or less as a background of Japanese sovereign wealth, according to Jeff Park, head of Alpha strategies to Bitwise.
But for experienced observers, it could be more a déjà-vu than an advance.
Flashback to 2019, SoftBank arrived at the headlines when its founder, Masayoshi Son, took a gigantic loss in a personal Bitcoin investment.
They were exposed to the cryptocurrency at the end of 2017, when the Mania Ico was at its peak and Bitcoin was quoted in a historical maximum of around $ 20,000.
With Bitcoin now quoting $ 93,000, the investment of Son would have been very profitable if he had maintained. But he sold at the beginning of 2018 when Bitcoin began to block, which resulted in a loss of $ 130 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
So, the question that investors could do now, would it be this time different?
To find a track, let’s take the Oracle stock (ORCL) as an example. Recently, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, announced that SoftBank would be part of an impulse of $ 100 billion to build an AI infrastructure in the United States together with Openai and Oracle (ORCL).
One would say that this is an upward result for ORCL actions. However, since the announcement was made on January 22, coinciding with Orcl at $ 188 per share, the action fell 28%, while Nasdaq has dropped 12% in the same period of time.
Other external factors, including winds against macro and geopolitical tension, could explain the low performance. It could also be a simple coincidence. However, an analyst linked this Oracle sale to SoftBank’s participation in the AI infrastructure project.
“When Softbank enters an asset that you own, bandages. I do not make the rules,” I wrote Quinn Thompson, founder of the Crypto Lekker Capital Coverage Fund, in a publication on X, citing Oracle’s recoil.
