Circle CEO Squares Off Against ‘Shark Tank’ Host About Crypto, Weighs In On Facebook’s Libra And Bitcoin’s Rise
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire squared off on CNBC against Mr. Wonderful (a.k.a. Kevin O’Leary) of Shark Tank on the importance of crypto, weighed in on Congressional scrutiny of Facebook’s Libra, and talked about the rapid rise of bitcoin. You can also watch the fight continue on Twitter here, where Jeremy calls Kevin’s understanding of crypto “incredibly weak and limited.”
Below is a video of their verbal tussle and below that are snippets of Jeremy’s remarks.
Jeremy on whether the recent price increase in bitcoin is tied to Facebook: “Crypto has been on the rise for 10 years…we’re going from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of users. I think the excitement around Libra is obviously do we go from tens or hundreds of millions of users to billions of users…so (Facebook) is driving awareness and driving interest and I think that’s really what’s behind the growth we’ve seen in bitcoin’s price.”
- Additional context: Jeremy previously accurately predicted bitcoin would hit $10k by June 21st, marking the beginning of Crypto Summer.
Jeremy says Rep. Maxine Waters and other lawmakers, ahead of the July 17 hearing on Facebook’s Libra, need to recognize crypto is here to stay. “I think it’s outstanding that we finally have national scale policy attention on crypto. This is an issue that’s been on the sidelines from a regulatory perspective; central bankers, treasury officials, others around the world have been largely dismissive of it for a number of years. But what’s very clear now is that cryptocurrency is here to stay. It’s going to be massive scale, it’s going to play a fundamental role in the transformation of the economic system as we build a digital-based economy and people have got to figure it out. So what I would be telling Maxine is you need to listen and learn because the technology is moving at an incredible pace. It’s not just an experimental project in the early, nascent stages and a white page from Facebook. Globally, tens of thousands of engineers are building things, constantly — there’s no stopping that, it’s growing and continuing to grow. So I would say right now it’s a time for policymakers to learn because this is a major breakthrough in the global economy.”
Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary claims crypto is unregulated. “That’s just not accurate. The crypto industry has been regulated in the US since 2013. If you want to sit between the banking system and cryptocurrency, you have to be licensed as a financial institution. We’ve been licensed broadly over that time in the US and EU. Just recently the international anti-money laundering standards body (FATF)defined the licensing that they think every country in the world needs around this…It’s a matter of time before every government in the world regulates crypto.”
Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary claims crypto is a rogue currency. “What we’re seeing is that there’s a new infrastructure layer of the internet. It not just about currency. It’s a fundamental new infrastructure for a very broad range of services, applications, information apps — it’s a major architectural shift. Currencies are just an app on top of that, securities and other types of financial products will be apps on top of that. This is a megatrend, it’s larger than the web, it will ultimately, I believe, be the foundation for pretty much every financial transaction, every financial asset that will be traded in the world.”
Can bitcoin be considered a currency if it doesn’t have a store of value? “Bitcoin is classified more as a commodity asset. The challenge here is that digital assets…sit on a spectrum from currency to commodity to security. Some assets actually have features that are all three. It may have revenue in yield-generating features, it may have utility features for someone who is utilizing it in a service or network and it can also be used as a payment token that settles instantly. The traditional classification of financial assets that we use today don’t work in this environment. So we’re seeing financial instruments that sort of defy those classifications.”
If you’re long crypto, should you be short banks? “Pick your time frame, but I would say over the next five to 10 years the ability to extract margin or fees from moving value around will go to zero, just like the ability to capture value from moving data around or communications around has dropped to zero…so that affects banks, payment schemes, others. I also think ultimately this leads to the rendering of a very broad range of financial services on top of this, which will be highly competitive to both retail and institutional banking.”
