Bitcoin Booster Peter Thiel Takes a Hit in BlockFi Bankruptcy

Earlier this year, Vauld Group, another cryptocurrency lender that Valar backed, froze customer withdrawals and filed for protection from its creditors in Singapore. 

Valar executives and a spokesman for Mr. Thiel didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. 

After co-founding financial-tech company

PayPal Holdings Inc.

two decades ago, Mr. Thiel gained renown in Silicon Valley for his early bets on startups including Facebook Inc. and SpaceX. These days, Mr. Thiel is perhaps as well-known for his libertarian politics and his endorsement of

Donald Trump

ahead of the 2016 election. 

The falling value of bitcoin and other digital assets, combined with the collapse of FTX, BlockFi and several other large crypto companies this year, have saddled venture capitalists with hundreds of millions of dollars of losses. Investors including Sequoia Capital and Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund Temasek have already written off their nine-figure investments in FTX. 

But few investors of Mr. Thiel’s stature have been as outspoken about crypto’s benefits. In April, Mr. Thiel took the stage at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami and lashed out at

Warren Buffett,

Jamie Dimon

and

Larry Fink

for their stances on crypto, calling the financiers “enemies” of bitcoin. He told the crowd that bitcoin represented a “revolutionary youth movement.” 

By 2018, Founders Fund, another venture-capital firm that Mr. Thiel helped found, amassed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin across several of its funds, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. 

“The biggest mistake I made in the last decade was getting too late and too little in bitcoin,” Mr. Thiel said during a March panel discussion on the app Callin.

Write to Peter Rudegeair at peter.rudegeair@wsj.com