Anthony Scaramucci is bullish as ever, says Bitcoin is ‘definitely a commodity’
Despite all the pushback he’s received from and over interest in crypto markets, Skybridge CEO Anthony Scaramucci says he hasn’t lost any enthusiasm for Bitcoin.
“I am not a cold figure in this room. I am not an evangelist. I’m not one of these religious figures who’s going to sing ‘Bitcoin über alles’ no matter what happens in life,” he said Decrypt during a recent interview for the gm podcast. “So I’ll put it in from that perspective, and then tell you that I’m more bullish now than I’ve ever been.”
He faces strong headwinds. Within Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy by November he had become professionally and personally close to Scaramucci. They teamed up to host the Crypto Bahamas Conference last April. In September, FTX bought one 30% stake in SkyBridge for 40 million dollars. And when Bankman-Fried’s empire crumbled, Scaramucci continued CNBC that he was “working to buy back the equity.”
Now he has his sights set on Bitcoin’s next boom cycle and hopes that regulators can get out of the way. As he sees it, Bitcoin really started to gather interest from a wider audience from late 2021 to late 2022.
“Before that, there was a kind of microbrewery known as Bitcoin. And people liked the beer that came out of the microbrewery,” Scaramucci said. “And then all of a sudden it had this Budweiser Light distribution explosion where everyone in the world and their mother was talking about Bitcoin.”
But he wouldn’t go so far as to call himself a Bitcoin maximalist. “They have no willingness to compromise,” Scaramucci said. “They have guns and convenience food in the basement, and they hate the government.”
He had harsh words for regulators, too — especially Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler.
“None of the things he does make sense to me,” Scaramucci said. “He has the SEC in complete disarray.” He also claimed that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has acted as if she is “Washington’s shadow financial services president.”
So he takes some comfort in the fact that, at least according to him, Bitcoin should be categorized as a commodity and not regulated by the SEC.
“I think it feels like money to me and feels like a commodity,” he said. “I think that these things that earn, or you have these stake positions where foundations give you more of something, I think that anything that has an earning mechanism to it is probably a security.”
The last word
Scaramucci said: “We need this, you know guys. Hong Kong is open for trading for crypto. They’re not stupid. They’re saying, ‘Ah, the US is going to blow this up. It’s fine, we’re switching positions. UK: They screwed up with Brexit. They all know it, but they’re open to trading for crypto. You know, our supposedly socialist neighbors to the north have two or three cash Bitcoin ETFs. We have Gary Gensler and Elizabeth Warren.”
