NYDIG, under new leadership, bets another $720 million on Bitcoin

NYDIG (New York Digital Investment Group) has raised $720 million for its Institutional Bitcoin Fund, as revealed in an SEC filing published last week.

A total of 59 named investors have contributed to NYDIG’s Bitcoin Fund. However, the filing does not specify when the firm plans to complete the purchase.

The document further states that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “has not necessarily reviewed the information in this filing and has not determined whether it is accurate and complete.”

One of the leading institutional players in the crypto space, NYDIG launched its Bitcoin Fund in 2018 – originally called the “Institutional Digital Asset Fund” – and raised $190 million in June 2020.

In October of that year, NYDIG’s parent company Stone Ridge purchased 10,000 Bitcoin (worth $115 million at the time) as part of its treasury reserve strategy, choosing its own subsidiary as a custodian provider. That made NYDIG one of the industry’s largest crypto managers with over $1 billion in digital assets on behalf of its clients.

The firm raised $1 billion last December at a valuation of more than $7 billion, in a round led by WestCap with participation from Morgan Stanley, MassMutual and others.

Management changes

In an interesting turn of events, NYDIG’s latest SEC filing was followed by Monday’s announcement that CEO Robert Gutmann and President Yan Zhao were leaving their roles to continue working at Stone Ridge.

As of release, Tejas Shah is the new CEO of NYDIG, while Nate Conrad is the new president. Shah and Conrad will focus on accelerating investment in NYDIG’s Bitcoin mining operations serving North American miners and advancing institutional bitcoin adoption through the Lightning Network—Bitcoin’s Layer 2 scaling solution.

“When markets crumble, character emerges. A flight to quality by the most risk-aware institutional investors has relentlessly driven bitcoin, and earnings, to NYDIG over the past 12 months,” Ross Stevens, founder and executive chairman of NYDIG, said in a statement.

He added that “even during the height of the crypto frenzy in H2 2021, our risk management discipline kept us completely away from DeFi, centralized lending platforms and the unsecured lending market.”

NYDIG further said that the firm’s balance sheet is now “the strongest it’s ever been,” with its Bitcoin balance hitting an all-time high in the third quarter, “up nearly 100% year-over-year, while revenue is up 130% through the second quarter and will increase in the third quarter.