Rising insecurities highlight the importance of crypto

Covid and the ensuing money-printing craze have been eye-openers to many people on the value of Bitcoin and its provable scarcity.

War in Ukraine and the general insecurity that is taking over the world now act as eye-openers on the value of crypto as an independent and resilient system, and some of those who stayed impervious to crypto until now are starting to change their minds.

CEO of the American hedge fund Citadel Ken Griffin has been a long-time crypto sceptic, who has been saying since 2017 that “there’s no need for cryptocurrencies” and relayed some other crypto-related FUD like the tulips, or environment, or lack of scalability.

It must have been hard to take a U-turn on the position assumed repeatedly, but it appears that the arguments in favour of crypto cannot be ignored anymore.

This week Ken Griffin admitted “I haven’t been right on this call” and said that Citadel Securities will be engaging in market making for crypto in the months to come. Citadel manages $38Bn, while Citadel Securities, its market making arm, is itself valued at $22 Bn after two crypto venture funds took stake in it in January.

More and more financial institutions are turning to crypto: the amount of Bitcoin held by funds and exchange-traded products has made an all-time high of 851k BTC this week, as per the data provided by Bytetree.

At the same time, the number of small Bitcoin holders (0.1-1BTC) is on the rise as well: IntoTheBlock indicated that the total balance of such addresses has reached an all-time high of 780k BTC.

The world is changing, and crypto may be the way to assure true asset ownership no matter what.