Griffin says ‘fair to assume’ that Citadel will be market making in crypto in ‘months to come’

Kenneth Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel, told Bloomberg in a new interview that his firm is on the path to market-making in the cryptocurrency sector in the coming months.

The comments came during a wide-ranging interview piece published Tuesday, during which the billionaire touched on subjects like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the overall temperature in the market.

In response to a question about Griffin’s past stance on crypto and the recent participation of VC firm Paradigm in Citadel’s $1.15 billion funding round earlier this year, Griffin said that crypto “has been one of the great stories in finance over the course of the last 15 years.”

“And I’ll be clear, I’ve been in the naysayer camp over that period of time. But the crypto market today has a market capitalization of about $2 trillion in round numbers, which tells you that I haven’t been right on this call,” he continued. Last fall, Griffin told the Economic Club of Chicago that regulatory uncertainty was keeping the market-making firm out of the crypto space.

In this week’s published remarks, Griffin conceded that “I still have my skepticism” but went on to say that “there are hundreds and millions of people in this world today who disagree with that.”

“To the extent that we’re trying to help institutions and investors solve their portfolio allocation problems, we have to give serious consideration to being a market maker in crypto,” he remarked. “It’s fair to assume that over the months to come, you will see us engage in making markets in cryptocurrencies.”

Last November, it was Griffin who prevailed in a multimillion-dollar auction for a rare copy of the US Constitution, beating out the crypto group ConstitutionDAO that had rapidly raised funds to fuel the effort.