Galaxy Digital ‘Bank’ Cashes Out Of Block.one Investment With 123% Profits

The Galaxy Digital Bank, or as it names itself the “crypto merchant bank” which is backed by a former Goldman Sachs partner Mike Novogratz, has recently cashed out 123% in gains from the bear market trend.

As a new press release obtained from us shows that Galaxy Digital Bank, which was launched near the peak of the Bitcoin bull market, has netted substantial gains on one of its major blockchain-related investments.

The release was re-shared on many best cryptocurrency news sites and revealed that Galaxy liquidated most of its shares in Block.one – the blockchain development startup and the fund behind the EOS protocol, for about $71.2 million.

The company (Galaxy Digital) has registered a realized return of 123% on the investment. Even though the merchant bank will only hold a minimal amount of shares of Block.one, they will still work with the startup in a number of capacities like the EOS-centric venture fund and as a proponent of the blockchain in general.

“The acceptance of Block.one’s tender offer reflected a decision to rebalance the portfolio to maintain an appropriate level of diversification after the position increased due to its substantial outperformance relative to the remainder of the portfolio,” Novogratz then said.

As the filing shows, Galaxy Digital Bank can attribute much of this loss to its principal investing and trading businesses, presumably due to the fact that November and December saw Bitcoin  and many other coins falling to fresh lows, as the altcoin news showed.

The filing notes that Galaxy Digital Bank is primarily founded by Novogratz’s wealth, 20% of which is purportedly invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Even though the company lost $272.7 million in all of 2018, much of the losses were incurred as a result of sale of cryptocurrency. One Twitter analyst also went in detail on this.

Looking at Galaxy Digital's yearend filing for 2018, some observations:

1) $BTC now 63%, $ETH 21%, $EOS 11%, $XMR 5%. Exited $WAX.
2) Looking like they bought ETHBTC in Q1, bought ETHUSD and BTCUSD in Q3, sold WAXEOS in Q4, sold ETHBTC Q4https://t.co/Fzc7Ld34xj pic.twitter.com/G0DInou0KX

— Su Zhu (@zhusu) May 9, 2019

However, this is not the end of Novogratz & co. The report revealed that as 2018 ended, Galaxy Digital Bank owned $350 million of assets, 50% of which constituted equity/stake in prominent industry startups.

More importantly, Galaxy Digital announced the launch of another fund (rumored with hundreds of millions in funding) which will loan out capital to cryptocurrency firms – a business which has boomed during the 2018 bear market – as the latest cryptocurrency news show.