btcmanager.com
American billionaire Barry Sternlicht is the latest to join the cryptocurrency bandwagon.
Sternlicht Sees Crypto As Hedge Against Inflation
In a recent interview with CNBC, Starwood Capital Group Co-founder Barry Sternlicht dubbed bitcoin ($BTC) as a financial tool that can help against the mass printing of fiat currencies.
Sternlicht said that unlike the typical government-issued currencies, $BTC has a maximum supply of 21 million which acts as the premier cryptocurrency’s hard ceiling and make it resistant to inflation.
He said:
“The reason I own bitcoin is because the US government and every government in the western hemisphere is printing money now to the end of time. And this is a finite amount of something and it can be traded globally.”
That being said, it would be a stretch to label the 60 year old billionaire a $BTC maximalist. He said that the only real purpose of bitcoin is to function as a reliable store of value.
In fact, Sternlicht sounds more receptive toward the multiple utilities of ether ($ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain. He dubbed $ETH as “a programmable bitcoin” with a lot more use-cases than the top cryptocurrency by reported market cap.
Speaking of ether, the billionaire added:
“I own some of it too.”
Sternlicht went on to state that in addition to the top two cryptocurrencies, he is very much interested in blockchain technology as a whole as it offers a wide array of potential use-cases that cut across industries.
Billionaires Warming up to Bitcoin
That Sternlicht has publicly endorsed the orange coin should not come as a surprise as an increasing number of the ultra-rich around the world are steadily warming up to cryptocurrencies as a reliable asset class.
As previously reported by BTCManager, billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones purchased bitcoin last year as a safe haven against the Fed’s infinite money printing.
Most recently, pro-crypto US Senator Cynthia Lummis revealed that she had added $100,000 worth of bitcoin to her personal portfolio, indicating $BTC’s rising trust among policymakers and individuals with regulatory influence.
At press time, bitcoin trades at $57,634, as seen on CoinGecko.