Dante Disparte, chief strategy officer and head of global policy at Circle, thinks that the turmoil in the cryptocurrency market over the past year may have signalled the transfer of crypto technology to “steadier hands” and more resilient businesses in 2023.
Disparte noted the expanding use of cryptocurrencies in the financial services industry in a post for The World Economic Forum (WEF) on January 2. He also expressed his opinion that the current bear market and exchange collapses may ultimately be beneficial for the sector, paving the way for “responsible, always-on internet finance.”
Perhaps 2022 will see a handover of crypto technology and blockchain infrastructure to steadier hands, he suggested. “Just as it took the dot-com bubble bursting in the early 2000s to hand over the future of the internet to more resilient companies, business models, and use cases,” he said.
Disparte expressed his views while working for Circle, the company that created the USD Coin stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the World Economic Forum’s Digital Currency Governance Consortium.
Disparte stated in the blog post that despite the “terrible year” for cryptocurrency, which he compared to a “ice age” for crypto rather than a “winter,” it will still be “integral” to the “modern economic toolkit.”
Cryptocurrency experienced one of the worst bear markets in history last year, and several important platforms in the industry collapsed.
Despite these setbacks, Disparte asserted that mainstream financial services will eventually turn to cryptocurrencies because “the technology remains a protagonist in the global financial world.”
In fact, Disparte continued, “watch what the big banks and mature financial services firms do, not what they say, as a test of the staying power of digital assets and blockchains at the core of financial services (and other areas of the global economy).
According to the Bitcoin Obituaries Archive, the death of Bitcoin has now been predicted more than 460 times. Despite some high-profile opposition from traditional financial institutions, some of the most vocal detractors have started to venture into the cryptocurrency space.
In a Jan. 2 opinion piece for the Diplomatic Courier, Disparte reiterated his position, calling it “disingenuous” for bankers to criticise cryptocurrency with one hand while attempting to co-opt its innovations with the other.
To dismiss all banking due to Danske Bank’s $230 billion money laundering pipeline would be equivalent to dismissing all crypto innovations, including the responsible and the irredeemable, he claimed.