Arthur Hayes Promises 'Straight Knock Out' in Showdown With Crypto Critic Nouriel Roubini

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Attendees of the upcoming 2019 Asia Blockchain Summit will get to witness a showdown on the future viability of crypto from two of the most prominent voices on either side.

Arthur Hayes, the co-founder and CEO of BitMEX, will go head-to-head against economist and crypto skeptic Nouriel Roubini in what the summit’s website is billing as a “Crypto Duel.”

Hayes promoted the event in a tweet on June 21, which Roubini subsequently retweeted.

It’s going down Jul 3rd. The Tangle in Taipei. Ain’t gonna be no rope-a-dope, just a straight knock out @Nouriel. pic.twitter.com/7VpNJQrwAa

— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) June 21, 2019

Esteemed for his credentials as a visiting researcher and advisor at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve, World Bank and Bank of Israel, and widely lauded for predicting the 2008 global financial crisis, Roubini has called crypto “the mother of all scams and bubbles” and blockchain “the most hyped tech ever.”

He’s also said on Twitter that when it comes to payment systems, blockchain “takes us back to stone age barter as tokenization of every good and service is barter.” According to the Harvard-educated economist, Bitcoin will crash to zero.

Hayes, on the other hand, a Citigroup and Deutsche Bank alumnus who dove into Bitcoin in 2014 to build BitMEX into one of the most liquid exchanges for crypto derivatives, says he thinks cash will disappear completely, giving Bitcoin the potential to skyrocket to $50,000.

The summit is scheduled for July 2nd and 3rd, and the debate itself is scheduled for 9:00 a.m. on the 3rd.

July will also mark another highly publicized meeting between a major crypto skeptic and prominent crypto entrepreneurs when Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, who has called Bitcoin “rat poison”, sits down for lunch with Justin Sun, CEO of Tron, and Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin, among other crypto insiders.

Despite crypto detractors who have declared the death of Bitcoin over 300 times, the world’s largest cryptocurrency is up 187% since the start of the year.