The co-founder of Paypal and one of Facebook's leading investors, Peter Thiel, invested between $15 and $20 million in bitcoin through his firm The Founders Fund in June 2017, when this currency fluctuated around $2,400 per unit, the Wall Street Journal revealed yesterday.

It is not known how much of these bitcoins Thiel sold at the peak of its currency boom, when it reached $20,000, but its current minimum profit is in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the well-known news media referring to sources close to the investor and his venture capital firm.

Last October, Thiel, whose individual fortune is $2.2 billion, said that people "were underestimating bitcoin. If bitcoin ends up as a gold cyber-equivalent, it still has a lot of potential,"he added at the time.

Few of the leading investors have bought large sums of bitcoins, perhaps fearful of the volatility of cryptocurrency or for lack of understanding about its functioning and potential. JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO Jamie Dimon has described bitcoin as a "fraud", while Bridgewater Associates founder Raymond Dalio said it was a bubble. On the contrary, for Peter Thiel bitcoin is a reserve value.

Founders, for its part, manages funds of more than $3 billion and has purchased interests in some 100 companies, including Facebook, Airbnb Inc., SpaceX and Lyft. More recent investments include hedge funds based on cryptocurrencies such as Metastable Capital and Polychain Capital, which invest in companies based on blockchain technology.

Other companies and institutions have joined similar initiatives by giving a vote of confidence to the cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. For example: Consensys, an organization whose purpose is to support entrepreneurship based on the development of decentralized technologies, announced in September 2017 the creation of an investment fund to support startups blockchain.

In the same vein, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange made public its intentions to establish a venture capital market through a blockchain-based platform. Information released in August last year by the CEO of this institution.