Veteran financial commentator Clem Chambers thinks the buzz surrounding the crypto industry has gifted it with a brand that rivals Apple.
Bitcoin.
In an interview with Kitco News, Chambers, the co-founder and CEO of the financial market website ADVFN, notes that the entire crypto market is only worth about $250 billion at this stage, a figure he calls “tiny” compared to the attention it has received.
“It’s a tiny, tiny, tiny market, but it has a massive, massive amount of interest, particularly amongst the so-called millennials, and particularly amongst people out in Asia. So, it’s really like having a fabulously famous brand that everybody loves like Apple, and then it is trading at a fifth of the value that Apple trades at.”
Chambers says it may be some time before institutional investors inflate the market.
“I’m not a big believer of institutions and crypto at this stage because I think they think it’s magic money. When I speak to institutions in the UK for example, they go ‘Oh yeah, crypto, that weird thing. No.’ They’re like years away from really engaging, and there’s no major investment banks running crypto desks. There’s no pension funds getting into crypto.”
Chambers says he’s been buying BTC since last year’s crash from an all-time high of just over $20,000. He attributes BTC’s resurgence in 2019 to the ongoing trade war between China and the US.
“The Chinese have always been big Bitcoin people and I think they’re afraid that… their own currency is going to get knocked, they’re going to be devaluing it. If you had a lot of yuan, you’d want to be out of that. Unfortunately for the Chinese, they can’t just take their money abroad because of their capital controls, so you’re going to stick it in Bitcoin, aren’t you? And that makes your money very flexible.
There’s also a lot of interest in Iran at the moment because obviously, America might be dropping its bombs on the unfriendly guys over there, and I think that’s also driving quite a lot of Bitcoin purchasing.”
