By CCN.com: Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire says humanity can’t survive the digital age without crypto because its decentralized nature and resiliency make it indispensable. Allaire made the remarks at the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Allaire says cryptocurrency skeptics are merely that way because they’re unfamiliar with the new technology.
“People throw around ‘crypto’ like it’s a bad thing — it’s scary,” Allaire said January 23. “Guess what? Cryptography is at the foundation of protecting modern society, human privacy. It’s a fundamental tool of our cyber defenses. It’s a fundamental tool of every corporation.”
Allaire pointed out that modern society relies on digital infrastructure. Accordingly, humanity ultimately won’t be able to survive the digital age without digital currencies.
“Crypto is fundamental to the future,” he said. “We need tamper-proof, resilient, decentralized infrastructure if we want society to survive the digital age.”
We see this as much more transformative even than the web. We think this has a long arc that will have a far greater impact on our civic institutions and our economic institutions.
Some believe that traditional bankers love to trash crypto because they’re secretly threatened that cryptocurrencies will render legacy financial institutions obsolete. However, Jeremy Allaire insists that central banks and the crypto ecosystem can co-exist.
“We’re huge proponents of central bank digital currency and we believed in that for a very long time,” Allaire says. “Our view is that the creation of cryptocurrencies that are based on central bank money is happening in the private sector first. We launched USD Coin last fall. It’s growing rapidly.”
Allaire says cryptocurrencies are versatile because they can run over a blockchain that works interoperably with tens of millions of digital wallets around the world.
It can be used in lending transactions, in payment transactions. It allows you to make dollar payments, globally, at pennies and in seconds to minutes. It’s a really powerful innovation.
Jeremy Allaire basically double-downed on his bullish outlook from December 2018. At the height of the bear market, Allaire predicted that the bitcoin price will rocket over the next three years.
Regardless of its daily price, Allaire believes bitcoin has a “very significant role” to play as a scarce, non-sovereign store of value.
However, not everyone at Davos is bullish about cryptocurrencies.
As CCN.com reported, Huw van Steenis — the senior adviser to Bank of England Governor Mark Carney — trashed crypto as worthless.
Similarly, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman is skeptical that bitcoin will achieve mass adoption by merchants because he says it’s not a currency and it’s inconvenient.
“We’re not seeing many retailers at all accept any of the cryptocurrencies,” Schulman said.
Some on Twitter reacted to Schulman’s anti-bitcoin shade by noting that less than 1% of the world used PayPal when it first launched. And look at it now. So the moral is: Revolutions take time.
Jeremy Allaire Image from DLDconference/YouTube