The last several months have been extremely volatile in the cryptocurrency market. There’s been rumors of exchanges being hacked, government shutdowns, and governments pouring millions of dollars into the crypto world. The world is a dynamic conundrum of deception and reality. On a recent trip to Austin, Texas, I couldn’t help but notice one of the airport welcoming signs when exiting the plane. The sign showed several companies and technologies that they were working on. Blockchain made the list, as you would expect. Maybe that’s why the airport is adding 9 terminals?
Fidelity, a behemoth in the financial services sector, implicitly announced they were entering cryptocurrency in a big way. Fidelity manages $2.45 trillion, with money allocated into funds ranging from bonds to crypto. They posted a position on the internal job board seeking a development operations engineer to create a digital asset exchange. A development operations engineer is an IT professional who would work with software developers, system operators, and other production IT staff to create this digital exchange to trade cryptocurrencies. The main objective would be to create the exchange and deploy it to the public and private cloud. Last year, CEO Abigail Johnson expressed her interest in cryptocurrencies and stated that they set up a small Bitcoin mining operation that now makes lots of money. Back in 2017, Fidelity allowed its charity division to accept donations in Bitcoin, and even collected $22 million in crypto donations. Other positions on the job board were workers to develop custodian services for Bitcoin and digital currencies.
Goldman Sachs, as noted before, has positioned itself for the adoption of the blockchain in the financial services industry. Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, sat down with Bloomberg for an interview recently. The interview came from the New York Economic Club, where Blankfien reiterated his positive stance on the innovative space. A question posed to him that caught my eye was, “Do you see cryptocurrency becoming a ‘real issue?’” Essentially, the response was it can be adopted the way paper money was adopted and gold and silver were replaced. He also mentioned that neither paper money nor crypto have intrinsic value but have become the standard in which value is exchanged.
I guess that is the game: the 1% use non-intrinsic value to buy assets that have intrinsic value. When non-intrinsic value money eventually goes to its true intrinsic value of 0, the 1% still own something. Blankfein even mentioned that it would be too arrogant to argue that crypto could not be adopted on a large scale because it is unfamiliar. Paper money was unfamiliar decades ago and we are now enslaved to it. Will the FED coin be the next thing to enslave us all?
Cheers,
Colin