(Bloomberg) -- Cantor Fitzgerald LP plans to launch a Bitcoin financing business to provide leverage to investors who own the cryptocurrency, deepening the investment bank’s growing ties to the digital assets sector.
The company will allocate $2 billion to fund the business’s lending activities at launch, the company said in a statement on Saturday. It will partner with select Bitcoin custodians to carry out the business, it added, without naming the companies or a timeframe for launch.
The new business was announced by Cantor Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Howard Lutnick, who was speaking at a Bitcoin-themed conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Once the initial $2 billion is exhausted, Cantor will continue to increase its allocation to the business in further $2 billion increments, Lutnick said.
“My view is that Bitcoin, like gold, should be free to trade everywhere in the world, and as the largest wholesaler in the world, we are going to do everything in our power to make it so,” Lutnick said, adding that Cantor already owns “a shedload” of the cryptocurrency.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is set to address the conference later Saturday. Trump may reveal plans to authorize the US government to build a Bitcoin haul worth tens of billions of dollars, his opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said a day earlier. If confirmed, the move would become a cornerstone pledge of Trump’s ongoing overture to the crypto industry.
Cantor acts as a custodian for Tether Holdings Ltd., the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin, USDT, which has roughly $114 billion in circulation. The firm has also raised billions of dollars in financing to digital-asset companies, Lutnick said on Saturday, including cryptocurrency miners Bitdeer, TeraWulf, Riot Platforms and Cipher Mining.
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