A senior adviser to the governor of the Bank of England and former strategist at Schroders said cryptocurrencies don’t pose a threat to the current financial ecosystem because they fail a number of fundamental tests.
Speaking to Bloomberg Television at the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Huw van Steenis said, among other things, cryptocurrencies are slow and don’t hold value.
See Bloomberg Television interview here.
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His comments come as decentralized and distributed-ledger technology attempts to disrupt the traditional financial system with proponents arguing it offers a more efficient and safer way to hold and exchange value.
However, to-date, digital currencies like bitcoin BTCUSD, +2.12% have failed to deliver on many promises with slow transaction times, high volatility and poor security hindering widespread adoption. “Customers want something cheaper, faster and better,” said van Steenis.
Read: Here’s an argument for tokenizing assets on the blockchain
The adviser to Mark Carney is leading a review around the future of finance for the U.K.’s central bank with a focus on payment systems, and while he brushed aside the threat of cryptos, he said the outlook for the fintech community as a whole is bright. “What I love when meeting with Fintechs is their obsession with customers.”
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