yolowire.com - Wall Street investment and financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald has announced plans to launch a new Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) lending business.
The announcement was made by Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive officer (CEO) Howard Lutnick at the “Bitcoin 2024” conference held in Nashville, Tennessee over the weekend.
Lutnick told a supportive crowd of crypto enthusiasts that: “We are going to launch with $2 billion in lending… We are going to welcome Bitcoin into the financing family of the global financial markets.”
According to a news release that accompanied Lutnick’s speech, the new lending business will provide leverage to Bitcoin holders.
Cantor Fitzgerald's new lending facility isn't its first foray into cryptocurrencies. The company already does business with stablecoin issuer Tether (CRYPTO: USDT) and owns Bitcoin outright.
Privately held Cantor Fitzgerald is known on Wall Street as one of the biggest bond brokerages and handles U.S. Treasury trading.
Separately, former U.S. President Donald Trump spoke at the same conference over the weekend, promising to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet” if he is re-elected president this fall.
Trump also said that he will order the U.S. government to refrain from selling Cryptocurrencies
seized in criminal cases and instead use the tokens to build a “strategic Bitcoin stockpile.”
However, Trump stopped short of promising to establish an official U.S. Bitcoin strategic reserve
currency, something crypto bulls have been calling for from political leaders in America.
Bitcoin’s price is approaching its all-time high of just under $74,000 U.S. reached in March
of this year as a new crop of spot BTC exchange-traded funds (ETFs) began trading.