It’s “real irony” that people are using crypto to withdraw from government
Although the cryptocurrency market is expanding at an unprecedented rate and becoming more adopted, not everyone is fully convinced of its role, including Ken Griffin – the founder and CEO of investment firm Citadel Securities.
As it happens, the Citadel boss finds it ironic that people are using assets like crypto to withdraw from the government, which he says they still depend on to solve so many other problems for them, as he told host Scott Wapner during CNBC ‘Delivering Alpha’ conference in an interview published on September 28.
According to Griffin, much of the government stimulus and lending at the start of the pandemic “went back into speculative assets, in many cases into NFTs, into crypto, into meme stocks. (…) Money misallocated in speculative assets does not create jobs in the long run, does not help create the long-term prosperity that makes America the country it is.”
The irony of cryptocentrism
On the other hand, the Citadel CEO said he understood some of the reasons people are turning to crypto, even if he found them ironic:
“I see my younger colleagues as much more cryptocentric than my older colleagues, and for good reasons, including, ironically, a sort of libertarian view of the world.”
As Griffin further explained, the irony also lies in the fact that people turn away from government despite their confidence in its ability to solve a host of other problems:
“You know, as our government gets bigger and bigger, a certain number of people kind of feel, ‘you know what, I want the privacy and I want to be – I want to withdraw from the government.'” (.. .) So what’s interesting is that we’re seeing people pull away from big government when they look at assets like cryptocurrency, which is a real irony given how people see government as being able to solve so many other problems.”
Citadel’s Crypto History
Meanwhile, it’s worth mentioning that Citadel is one of the financial heavyweights that along with Charles Schwab, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paradigm, Sequoia Capital and Virtu Financial recently formed a compatible cryptocurrency exchange called EDX Markets, after announcing it in early June . , as Finbold reported.
In early August, a petition was launched demanding that the chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, be fired for failing to protect ordinary investors from the fraud caused by short selling and the abuse of dark pools that allegedly committed by Citadel Securities.
