The Houston Firefighters’ Relief and Retirement Fund has announced that it has invested $25 million of its $5.5 billion of assets into crypto, stating that crypto was an asset “we could not ignore”. The move follows on the heels of a couple of Virginia public pension funds that expanded their crypto investments last month.
As reported by Bloomberg Wealth, The Houston Firefighters’ Relief and Retirement Fund made its investment in the crypto assets of Bitcoin and Ethereum by way of NYDIG, a subsidiary of Stone Ridge. According to Ajit Singh, the fund’s chief investment officer:
“It has a positive expected return and it manages my risk. It has a low correlation to every other asset class.”
For Singh, investment into crypto is more about direct buying of tokens rather than futures-related purchases.
“We didn’t want to get the synthetic exposure,” he said. “We decided to go directly to the token. As more and more institutional adoptions happen, there will be more and more dynamics that develop for supply and demand. And having physical assets — actual tokens — gives us in the future the possibility of income generation potential.”
The Houston Firefighters fund provides the benefits to more than 6600 active and retired firefighters and family members. The firefighters themselves contribute 9% of their salaries while the city of Houston provides double this.
Singh added:
“We have been studying this as an asset class to add to our investment portfolio for quite some time; we were watching it, we were analyzing it,” he said. “It became an asset class we could not ignore anymore.”
It was also reported by Bloomberg last month that Virginia Public Pensions had decided to extend their crypto exposure by investing $50 million into Parataxis Capital Management, which purchases digital tokens and cryptocurrency derivatives.
The two pensions involved had already invested several times into Morgan Creek Asset Management Funds and then earlier this year they had invested in crypto venture firm Blockchain Capital.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
