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Ripple’s head of global institutional markets says that if past is prologue, the stage is set for a long-term Bitcoin bull run.
On a new episode of Block Stars, Breanne Madigan says BTC has solidified its status as a store of value and potential hedge against global economic risks.
“If you were to look within the asset class of crypto, if any asset could be considered safe-haven more reliably, I’d say that’s Bitcoin. Just given its core utility has always been this concept of a store of value, so it would be the natural beneficiary of that core utility case. Bitcoin has still been the best-performing asset so far year-to-date, up almost 40%…
Markets love transparency, and so that is what makes Bitcoin very attractive in many respects, because it’s forecastable and people understand exactly what’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen. And I think markets love that sense of certainty. If you look at the past two halvenings prior to the most recent one, we saw a rally into it, but also between the date of the halvening and anywhere between 12 and 18 months after, we saw continued appreciation and then the eventual high. So there’s a lot of reason to be particularly optimistic about not just Bitcoin but also other digital assets.”
Madigan says she expects investors to increasingly broaden their horizons beyond BTC as the crypto industry matures.
“I think we’re going to see investors that were previously Bitcoin-only maximalists expand into other altcoins as we develop increased utility and use cases for digital assets broadly. And I think as those utility cases grow you’re going to see a much higher rate of institutional investors crossing over [with] macro hedge funds, including some allocation to crypto as an asset class as sort of a rule of thumb, not the exception.”
Ripple holds more than half of the total supply of XRP, and Madigan says the company is pushing to make the digital asset the core component of a global money transfer revolution.
“We are looking at solving a real-world problem leveraging XRP, which is how do we get assets from one country to another without having to go through the legacy nostro-vostro account system. And that is a complete game changer. We’ve never had the availability to send money cross-border as rapidly as we can leveraging our on-demand liquidity platform, what we call ODL. And that to me represents real utility for the use case of digital assets.”
Regulatory concerns are still a top priority at Ripple, says Madigan. She expects laws guiding the use of cryptocurrency to become increasingly clear as the pace of crypto asset adoption rises.
“I think there are a number of issues, still, that we as an industry have to address, around legacy concerns about security or about the operational risks of trading in the asset class or regulatory certainty. All of those things we’re making a ton of progress on, but until we remove a number of those significant hurdles I think you will see slower adoption. As the adoption rates increase, we wil see greater participation from traditional institutional investors, and I think as we do see traditional investors come in, the volatility will be reduced over time.”
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