As use cases and usage grow, according to incoming Kraken CEO David Ripley, Bitcoin (BTC) will become a significant financial benchmark.
In a recent interview with SALT's managing director John Darsie, Ripley asserts that Bitcoin might begin to function independently of fiat currencies like the US dollar and eventually be used as a common unit of measurement in the financial industry.
“On this relative global fiat currency game, yeah it’s interesting, right? A lot of these various different domestic global currencies and how they’re performing versus the dollar are interesting. I think that’s what we’re going to be looking at as far as Bitcoin actually being a benchmark. At some point in time, of course, we’re quite volatile now and we’re risk-on and all these different pieces, but as adoption grows and use cases grow and we begin to have more and more usage for commerce and so forth, I think it’s actually going to be that benchmark with a deterministic money supply that will behave meaningfully differently than all these fiat currencies that don’t have a deterministic supply.”
There are already two distinct use cases for cryptocurrencies, according to the new CEO of the US-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, and more will come. According to him, a use case must demonstrate that the replacement is 10 times superior.
“Bitcoin and crypto’s value for global payments, global transfers is clear in terms of friction, costs and all these pieces. But it really only becomes 10x better, which is what we actually need, we need 10x better for that particular use case, once you have all of the infrastructure built out, once you have crypto in the hands of everyone and they have wallets and they have mechanisms to actually use it…
And once you get there, then the use case becomes really powerful. So we have this kind of catch-22. We’re building out all of this infrastructure. It’s significant what actually is entailed in doing that, getting crypto in everyone’s hands and doing it in a distributive way globally. It’s going to take time, but looking for these 10x use cases, there’s going be more out there than just that one. Some that might even be easier but maybe a lot smaller.”
Collectibles like non-fungible tokens, he claims, are yet another obvious application for cryptocurrency (NFTs).
“Let’s take NFTs. I collected baseball cards growing up. The fact that there’s now a digital baseball card, that’s actually probably better in a lot of ways. It may be 10x better than that little piece of cardboard that I had and cherished for whatever reason.”
