VanEc’s Crypto Lending Fund Grants $35m Investments from 2 Fairfax Retirement Funds

VanEck, a global investment manager that provides Exchange Traded Fund and Mutual Funds, announced that it has granted a $35 million direct investment from two Fairfax County retirement funds in Virginia for its digital assets lending fund. 

The asset manager revealed that the investment was from two of Fairfax County’s retirement systems, including the Fairfax County Employees’ Retirement System and the Fairfax County Police Officers Retirement System respectively.

According to the announcement, Fairfax County may still be injecting additional cash in the near future as the investment was described as the initial tranche of commitment into the VanEck New Finance Income Fund, LP.

Fairfax County’s interest in investing in the VanEck New Finance Income Fund shows that the current crypto winter is not impacting the overall trust in the potential of digital currencies by institutional investors. 

The New Finance Income Fund, according to VanEck, was established back in December 2021 and is “designed to seek income opportunities for investors via short-term lending arrangements with digital assets entities through a simplified approach that alleviates the operational burden of direct digital assets lending.”

The asset manager said the fund is only available to institutional investors and takes away the hurdles associated when investors choose to invest in the nascent asset class themselves directly.

VanEck is a major player in the crypto ETF scene that has been making a valid case for institutional investors to wade into the crypto ecosystem. The firm comes off as one of the first organizations that started lobbying the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF. 

While VanEck has quite a number of Bitcoin ETF rejections from the SEC, the firm was ranked as the second to win the regulator’s approval to establish a Bitcoin Futures ETF product in the US after ProShares last year. The company’s products are diversified and have products tracking Bitcoin mining.

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