Correction: make that “mother of all crashes.”

Steve Cohen, the billionaire Chairman and CEO of Point72 Asset Management, the family office, came out swinging in favor of cryptos in an interview last week. “I’m not going to miss this,” he said. “I already feel like I missed the first part of it, but I still feel like it’s early.” (Bitcoin.com)

Steve Cohen on crypto and blockchain

• “I’m doing a deep dive into crypto. I’m fully converted.”
• “Forget bitcoin,” he said. “I don’t care about bitcoin. I care more about the technology behind the blockchain and how transformational it is and how disruptive it could be.”
• “I feel like the way those markets are developing could be a real interesting adjacency to what we do at Point72.”
• “I have an old saying at the poker table, you got to pay to learn. There’s no way around it. You can talk all you want, but you’ve got to get in the game.”
• “I’m hopeful that we will be able to start building something within Point72.”
• “I may look foolish initially, but you size it accordingly, learn the game, and when you’re confident, then take it to the next level.”

However, Michael Burry, of ‘Big Short’ fame, and its startlingly correct prediction of the 2008 GFC, is not so gung-ho on cryptocurrencies. He fears a crash is near, and it may be fuelled by leverage.

Michael Burry on crypto FOMO and leverage

From Thursday tweets as reported by Bloomberg:

• “All hype/speculation is doing is drawing in retail before the mother of all crashes.”
• “#FOMO Parabolas don’t resolve sideways”
• “When crypto falls from trillions, or meme stocks fall from tens of billions, Main Street losses will approach the size of countries. History ain’t changed.”
• “The problem with crypto, as in most things, is the leverage.”
• “If you don’t know how much leverage is in crypto, you don’t know anything about crypto, no matter how much else you think you know.”

Bitcoin down over the weekend

Prophecies from Steve Cohen and Michael Burry aside, leading crypto bitcoin was under pressure over the weekend following mine closures amid a regulatory crackdown in China.

One estimate said about 90% of Chinese bitcoin mining capacity was offline because of closures in the southwestern region of Sichuan.

Sentiment was also clouded by fears of a regulatory backlash following the recent crash in the Titan token to a value near zero. That stablecoin even counted billionaire Mark Cuban among its investors.

At the time this is being written, around 02:00 am on Monday ET, bitcoin is trading at $34,445, down over 3% over the past 24 hours.

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Image of Steve Cohen: p72.vc