The CEO of a global digital asset exchange says the relevance and adoption of cryptocurrencies will swell as geopolitical tensions rise and the US dollar hegemony grows.
In a new video with Circle chief executive Jeremy Allaire, Binance head Changpeng Zhao says that as the world gets more divided and the US dollar increasingly gets used as a sanctions tool, crypto will emerge as an alternative.
“Money is a very strong tool for governments to influence each other, the geopolitics, etc. [The] US dollar is one of the strongest tools that the US has…
The world is becoming more divided. When the world becomes more divided, guess what? People will tend to try to use the currency as a tool to enforce sanctions and etc.
When you do that a lot, people look for a neutral thing to use, which is cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is very neutral. It doesn’t belong to any country. No one can mint more of it. There’s no inflation. It’s the most neutral thing.
Then for businesses that want to do business globally, that don’t want to get stuck and get their bank accounts frozen by this country, that country, guess what? They will use the neutral technology.”
Zhao says that the dominance of the US dollar is also likely to be eroded if the US fails to embrace cryptocurrency technology.
“[The] US has to think about, ‘Hey, does this [crypto] decrease the influence of US dollars globally?’ Which it probably does, to be very frank.
So [the] US can fight it for a long time. If you keep fighting it, this thing will develop for the rest of the world.
You can protect the US dollars for a slightly longer period of time, but then the rest of the world is probably going to move to crypto. In the long term, you cannot protect US dollars forever, most likely. Then you don’t have a future.”
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