Circle CEO: Crypto isn’t too big to fail yet
By Benjamin Pimentel, Feb 22,2022 @ Protocol.com
In this interview, Jeremy Allaire (founder & CEO of Circle) talks about the push for an official U.S. digital dollar and why he thinks the Fed should essentially get out of the way and let stablecoin companies like Circle take the lead. He also talked about why he thinks crypto has not yet reached the point of being too big to fail, “but it’s certainly too big to ignore.”
“Conversations are a hell of a lot better now than they were two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, five years ago,” Allaire said. Back then, “if I walked in the room and said, ‘I’m doing like a crypto bank,’ people would think I’m an alien and just be like, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to get in trouble for having a meeting with you…..”
And now blockchain, crypto finance, digital currency are essentially the internet finally colliding with the financial system. There’s a huge challenge there. A lot of the rules that were written and a lot of the regulations that exist were highly incremental relative to the way that the financial economic system worked in fairly tightly controlled, privately controlled infrastructures.
Now, you’ve got a public internet, a public infrastructure, open-source software. The concept of that and the financial system again makes people’s heads explode. :’)
The interesting question, if you step back and ask a different question, is: Over the last 75 years, where has all of the innovation in electronic money happened? Has any of it been created by the federal government? And the answer is no.
Everything we have, from the wire system to credit cards and debit cards to ATMs, to PayPal to Apple Pay to stablecoins, has been kind of driven by private sector innovation, but has fit within a safety and soundness framework around the actual underlying dollars.
I think the more urgent issue for the United States is, if the United States wants the dollar to be the currency of the internet and wants to compete with the dollar as the currency of the internet, that is a here and now thing.
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