New $100 Million Cryptocurrency Hedge Fund to Use XRP

3 min readDec 2, 2017

TechCrunch and CrunchFund founder Michael Arrington has announced he is going all in on cryptocurrency investments with a new hedge fund called Arrington XRP Capital. As the name suggests, the fund will be managed in Ripple’s XRP but it will invest in a wide variety of cryptocurrency assets and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) as well as private equity offerings.

$100 Million in XRP Investments

According to Arrington, the $100 million cryptocurrency hedge fund has commitments from investors for over $50 million already, and they plan to begin trading in the next few weeks.

Other than the founder, two additional partners in the venture are former CEO of TechCrunch Heather Harde and veteran technology executive Geoffrey Arone.

This move is another strong indication of just how much cryptocurrency is recently becoming a mainstay in Silicon Valley as well as among established venture capitalists.

Why XRP?

Besides being denominated in XRP, the new fund will accept investment funds and make redemptions in the cryptocurrency as well pay fees and salaries out in XRP. This is despite the fact that it doesn’t have a commercial relationship with Ripple and they are not investors in the fund, Arrington said.

In his announcement, the CrunchFund founder only explains the choice of the cryptocurrency for its advantages over ‘ancient fiat methods’ for cross-border currency transfers, asserting that traditional means are too slow and laden with fees.

Asked specifically about the choice of the cryptocurrency at the Consensus conference he elaborated that: “We think XRP is a particularly useful currency because of the transaction times.” Arrington also added: “I think investors are maybe heavier in bitcoin and ether than they should be.”

At the bottom line, the TechCrunch founder seems very bullish on the cryptocurrency ecosystem, predicting that the overall market cap will rise from around $300 billion to trillions of dollars and signalling that he intends to spend the rest of his career in this field.