CoinShares Exec Questions Crypto Exchanges & Transactions

Bitcoin might not be seeing a whole lot of rewards from the massive flood of institutional investors this year but a senior executive at one of the space’s well-known companies has warned that it might stay this way…

Speaking in an interview last week, the chief strategy officer at the asset manager CoinShares, Meltem Demirors has said that Wall Street involvement in Bitcoin was not a straightforward win-win for adoption. 

Several people commented on the attention crypto is receiving and expects to see a lot more from bigger financial firms in order to help change the image of Bitcoin on an international level. The range and debut of products like Bakkt’s regulated bitcoin futures in September show a desire to cater to institutional demand.

In fact, one of the biggest crypto-focused asset managers out there, Greyscale announced this month that demand had remained strong throughout the whole of this year. 

Demirors was a tad more skeptical though and said:

“If we take 50% of the world’s Bitcoin and we put it in custody with a custodian that’s regulated... and we take these Bitcoins, and we put them in a vault somewhere… and then we issue Bitcoin depository receipts — pieces of paper that allow us to trade the underlying Bitcoins sitting in a vault somewhere — but we never actually exchange Bitcoin on the Bitcoin network, is that still Bitcoin?”

The Rise of Crypto

The rise in the price of cryptocurrencies has been often accompanied by an increase of general interest by big institutional investors. At the end of 2017, we saw a lot more people enter the market who probably never even heard of cryptocurrency and get involved with the space. 

It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out though. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!