{"id":213593,"date":"2021-03-29T12:16:53","date_gmt":"2021-03-29T09:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/norwegian-billionaire-ditches-skepticism-invests-in-local-crypto-exchange\/"},"modified":"2021-03-29T12:16:53","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T09:16:53","slug":"norwegian-billionaire-ditches-skepticism-invests-in-local-crypto-exchange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/norwegian-billionaire-ditches-skepticism-invests-in-local-crypto-exchange\/","title":{"rendered":"# Norwegian billionaire ditches skepticism, invests in local crypto exchange"},"content":{"rendered":"

“# Norwegian billionaire ditches skepticism, invests in local crypto exchange <\/strong>”
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Within the same month, Norwegian billionaire investor \u00d8ystein Stray Spetalen has gone from dismissing Bitcoin (BTC) as a “nonsense currency” to revealing that he has joined the board of Norway’s top domestic crypto exchange MiraiEx.<\/p>\n

Spetalen’s former position was that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin should be “immedia<\/a>tely” banned by the Norwegian and European authorities due to the destructive effect that mining them has on the environment. In a pre-recorded interview\u00a0screened<\/a>\u00a0at the\u00a0DNB Invest conference on March 18, he said:<\/p>\n

\u201cBitcoin today consumes as much energy as all of Norway. It is extremely environmentally hostile. The authorities and the EU should ban it immediately. Then you\u2019d cut CO2 emissions considerably […] It’s just nonsense. We\u2019re doing well with the payment systems that are in place today.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet by March 26, in an interview with Norwegian news<\/a>paper Finansavisen, Spetalen had changed his tune. \u201cWhen the facts change, I change,\u201d he said, \u201cI met the MiraiEx founders Thuc and \u00d8yvind the day after the podcast was recorded, early in March, and I realized that I had been wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Norwegian cryptocurrency exchange and custodian MiraiEx had just\u00a0raised<\/a> 5 million kroner ($580,000) in late 2020 to further expand its operations. Aside from investing in a successful local exchange and joining its board, Spetalen has also app<\/a>arently now bought Bitcoin, although in a lesser quantity than fellow Norwegian billionaire Kjell Inge R\u00f8kke has. Disclosing his unspecified investment in the top cryptocurrency, Spetalen said:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I also read that Kjell Inge R\u00f8kke had got into Bitcoin, it was quite obvious. I can’t bear to see that R\u00f8kke makes money and not me.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

R\u00f8kke serves as chairman\u00a0of the\u00a0$6 billion industrial holding company\u00a0Aker\u00a0ASA, which set up<\/a> a dedicated unit for investing in projects and companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem in early March of this year. The unit has been initially capitalized with 500 million kroner (~$58.6 million) and plans to keep all its liquid investable assets in Bitcoin.<\/p>\n

It has also recently been revealed that the $1 trillion Norwegian Government Pension Fund, also known as the Oil Fund and the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, indirectly owns almost 600 Bitcoin through its investment holdings.<\/p>\n