As the price of bitcoin cratered last year, falling 83% and erasing $250 billion in market value, one company has secretly been making a killing with some rather unusual business transactions. 



Selling to a paradoxical mixture of bitcoin-believing crypto entrepreneurs and hedge funders out to profit off what they hope is the demise of cryptocurrency, bitcoin lending firm Genesis Global Capital originated $1.1 billion in cryptocurrency loans last year, according to a report released today.



Charging interest rates that ensure that its pockets get lined regardless of whether a customer loves or hates crypto, the company is leading the way as a rising tide of crypto startups compete to stay cash positive in this epic bear market.



“It should be possible for people to go long and short bitcoin,” says Michael Moro, the CEO of Genesis Global Capital. “It can’t just be a long-only market. It should be perfectly okay to take the other side, to think that prices are going to fall, and to make that short bet.”



Genesis passed the billion dollars in bitcoin loans milestone on December 14, 2018, less than three months after announcing it had made $500 million in loans since its launch in March 2018. To put that another way, Genesis made another $500 million in bitcoin loans during the last quarter of 2018.



As the price of bitcoin fell 39% over the last two months of the year, Genesis experienced its busiest period so far. New hedge funds and trading firms utilizing “spot” borrowing, combined with new business including crypto collateral—and even the occasional traditional cash loan in exchange for crypto collateral—increased Genesis’ active loans outstanding to $153 million, up from $23M in Q3 2018.



Interest rates on the cryptocurrency loans range from about 10% to 12% for highly liquid cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, depending on how risky Genesis deems the way the customer plans to use the loan. The less liquid the cryptocurrency, the higher the starting interest rate.



The massive increase in loan originations was jump-started by a 16% drop in the price of bitcoin on November 14, as a result of interest from short sellers looking to profit from the drop. Brian Kelly, a cryptocurrency investor who&#8217;s been a Genesis customer for five years, sees this kind of transaction activity as crucial to the health of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. “Having an active two-sided market should help liquidity improve overall,” he says.



But not everyone shorted crypto. In fact, Moro says that only about 11% of bitcoin loans were used to bet against bitcoin’s rising price. Instead, he says, the most popular use of bitcoin was for companies like bitcoin ATM firms that need to take short-term possession of bitcoin, accounting for 50% of all loans, followed by those buying cryptocurrency on one exchange and then selling on another at a higher rate, a process call arbitrage.



Bitcoin was the most frequently borrowed cryptocurrency, comprising 75% of all the originated loans. Ether (ETH) and XRP were the second and third most frequently borrowed cryptocurrencies, with ETH borrowing more than doubling since Q3 but still comprising less than 10% of the total loan book. XRP composition since Q3 is down 50%, which Moro attributes to the cryptocurrency&#8217;s relative strength over that period. The concentration of loans outside the top three decreased as a result of bitcoin jumping nearly 10% in one month.



Heading into Q4, Genesis&#8217; loan portfolio was about 60% BTC and 40% alt-coins, with XRP constituting nearly 50% of altcoins, according to the report. Prior to Q4, 98% of bitcoin on loan was used exclusively for hedged use cases such as arbitrage, basis capture, and remittance.



Genesis is in the unusual position of being run by a parent company, Digital Currency Group, that has invested in more than 125 cryptocurrency startups globally. That company is headed up by Barry Silbert, the founder of SecondMarket, which was acquired by Nasdaq in 2015 to help startups sell shares before they go public.



As a result of having direct access to this pipeline of venture-backed and, more importantly, venture-vetted crypto startups, Moro’s other company, SEC registered Genesis Global Trading, started unofficially lending crypto as far back as 2014 to what he calls the company’s “friends and family” clients. “We didn’t think about too much of it at the time,” he says. &nbsp;



But by the end of 2017, at the peak of a crypto-frenzy that saw the overall cryptocurrency market reach $800 billion, Moro joined a fleet of other companies looking to profit even in a down market and spun off the trading company’s lending operations into a stand-alone entity.



As a result of this rising interest, Genesis is far from the only company in the space. Last year hedge fund manager Michael Novogratz’ company, Galaxy Digital, invested $52.5 million in crypto lending startup BlockFi. Other competitors include crypto startup Aave, which raised $16.5 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) in part to power its EthLend lending product, and early entrant Salt Lending, which was founded as far back as 2016.



Facing this rising tide of competitors, Genesis is looking to even further diversify its revenue streams. Moro says that while 75% of the $153 million he has in the portfolio is denominated in bitcoin, 13%, or about $20 million, is for lenders who don’t want to sell their bitcoin at today’s low price of $3,381, down from its all-time high of $19,000 in 2017, but want to generate a bit of revenue by using it as collateral for cold hard cash.



“We wanted to see if there was a demand for that, and there was,” he says.



-Michael del Castillo Forbes Staff

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Why Genesis Made Over $1 Billion In Bitcoin, Ethereum And XRP Loans

In the world of cryptocurrency, where billion-dollar fortunes can be made overnight, speed is everything — and CZ is the fastest of them all. From closet-size offices in Tokyo — &#8220;I would touch four people if I turned around in a circle&#8221;— the 41-year-old Chinese-Canadian coder runs Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange that has gone from a standing start to the largest on the planet in just under 180 days. CZ (born Changpeng Zhao) cut his teeth making high-frequency trading systems for Wall Street&#8217;s flash boys, and he built Binance to be a Ferrari. His exchange can process a blazing 1. 4 million transactions a second and on a peak trading day in January processed 3.5 billion new orders, cancels and trades. Speculators (some 25% of them from the U.S.) use Binance to trade 120 different coins, generating $200 million in profits for CZ&#8217;s exchange last quarter. BNB, the virtual coin CZ created in August that gives holders a 50% discount on trading fees, has a market cap of $1.3 billion. His stake in Binance and his coins give CZ a personal fortune worth as much as $2 billion.
He is hardly alone in becoming insanely and instantly rich from crypto. Chris Larsen, a longtime tech exec known for cofounding a string of fintech apps, saw his net worth flirt with $20 billion at the height of cryptomania in early January, based on his ownership of 5.2 billion XRP, the tokens of Ripple, the company he founded. XRP has since crashed 65%, but Larsen still tops Forbes&#8217; first crypto rich list, our (necessarily inexact) accounting of the 20 wealthiest people in crypto.
There are now nearly 1,500 crypto-assets in existence, valued at an aggregate of $550 billion, up 31 times since the beginning of 2017. While the prices of individual cryptocoins continue to swing wildly — Bitcoin is down almost 50% from its peak — it&#8217;s clear that blockchain-based currency is here to stay and that these virtual assets have real, albeit volatile and speculative, value. Black-market transactions, tax avoidance by individuals and sanctions-dodging by countries like North Korea fuel part of the demand, but so does a widespread excitement over the technology and an ideological desire for money to be free from the whimsies of nation-states.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2017/09/04/bitcoin-blockchain-billions/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Bitcoin, Blockchain And Billions</a>
The winners of this digital lottery differ from those in previous manias. The shadowy beginnings, at once anarchistic, utopian and libertarian, drew an odd lot of pioneers who ranged from anti-establishment cypherpunks and electricity-guzzling &#8220;miners&#8221; to prescient Silicon Valley financiers and a larger-than-usual assortment of the just plain lucky &#8220;hodlers&#8221; (the typo-inspired crypto jargon for &#8220;buy and hold&#8221; investors). As in any gold rush, selling the pans and pickaxes &#8211; in this case running exchanges &#8211; is proving a more reliable path to riches than speculation. And, of course, easy money — especially if it&#8217;s viewed as a bearer asset — attracts scam artists and thieves.
Banking heir Matthew Mellon, whose $2 million investment in <a href="https://ripple.com/xrp/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">XRP</a> blossomed into some $1 billion, learned that firsthand in January. The morning after a big bash, the 54-year-old recent divorcé says he discovered four people rooting around his $150,000-a-month Los Angeles party pad. (He didn&#8217;t report it to the police.) The unwanted guests were probably after his XRP and they stole four laptops and two cellphones. They didn&#8217;t get Mellon&#8217;s crypto-fortune — anyone with enough assets to make our list long ago figured out how to secure it. (Sorry, thugs.) In Mellon&#8217;s case, the private keys are divided up and safely scattered in cold storage around the country in other people&#8217;s names. But the incident underscores the weirdness that separates cryptomania from bubbles past.
Identifying the biggest crypto winners and estimating the scale of their wealth is no simple task. The virtual currencies exist almost entirely outside the global financial system, and the newly minted crypto rich live in a strange milieu that blends paranoid secrecy with ostentatious display. Take CZ&#8217;s <a href="https://www.binance.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Binance</a> exchange. It has no real headquarters: Employees are scattered across several countries, and CZ himself seems to change locales the way others change clothes. &#8220;We don&#8217;t want to be in one place right now because of regulatory uncertainty,&#8221; says CZ. Last we heard, CZ and his trademark black hoodie had just popped up in Taiwan.
And CZ is downright normal by crypto-billionaire standards. Former child actor Brock Pierce (The Mighty Ducks, First Kid) dresses like a cut-rate Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and is given to making grandiose statements from the balcony of his penthouse in Santa Monica, California. &#8220;This is an opportunity to be a trillionaire &#8211; someone who is positively impacting a trillion living things on this planet,&#8221; he tells Forbes. Pierce once raised $60 million from Goldman Sachs with the help of Stephen Bannon, President Trump&#8217;s former chief strategist, to fund a company that sold virtual swords, chain mail and horses to role-playing videogamers. He also once got into trouble with his partners in a 1990s-era dot-com start-up after they were accused, in civil lawsuits, of sexual abuse of underaged boys. (Pierce has always denied the accusations and was never charged; one of his business partners, however, pleaded guilty to transporting minors across state lines for the purpose of sex.)
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2017/09/04/emperors-new-coins/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The Emperor&#8217;s New Coins</a>
Pierce was early into the crypto game, first mining Bitcoin and then financing blockchain start-ups and investing in dozens of initial coin offerings. Although he publicly proclaims he is pledging a billion dollars to charity, he refuses to provide documentation that proves he has anywhere near that much money.
Given this opaqueness and crypto&#8217;s hyper-volatility, we are presenting our net-worth estimates in ranges. We based our numbers on estimated holdings of cryptocurrencies (a few provided proof), post-tax profits from trading crypto-assets and stakes in crypto-related businesses. We&#8217;ve also categorized our crypto rich list into five groups: idealists, builders, opportunists, infrastructure players and establishment investors. Many fit into more than one category.
It&#8217;s a near certainty that we&#8217;ve missed some people and that some of our estimates are wide of the mark. But this was equally true when we launched the first Forbes 400 list of America&#8217;s richest people in 1982. At the time, many people said we couldn&#8217;t — or shouldn&#8217;t — publish it. We did so anyway. And we firmly believe we made the world a better place by shining a light on the invisible rich. Just as crypto has evolved from the days of the Silk Road drug site and the Mt. Gox digital hijacking, fortunes of this magnitude should never be allowed to lurk in the shadows. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="contrib block byline">Jeff Kauflin</a>, FORBES STAFF
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/richest-in-cryptocurrency/#73d03dd11d49" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ THE FULL LIST OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN CRYPTOCURRENCY</a>

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Why Genesis Made Over $1 Billion In Bitcoin, Ethereum And XRP Loans

Forbes’ First List Of Cryptocurrency’s Richest People: Meet The Secretive Freaks, Geeks And Visionaries