During Fortune’s Most Powerful Next Gen conference, ARK founder Cathie Wood warned that the U.S. is falling behind in the crypto world.
Key Details
- The center of cryptocurrency is moving away from the U.S., according to Wood, who pointed to Coinbase receiving licensing in Bermuda as an example.
- During Fortune’s conference, Wood said that the U.S. regulatory system is causing the country to lose its place in the crypto market, CoinDesk reports.
- In addition to its growing presence in Bermuda, Coinbase has started expanding operations in Singapore, while its presence in the U.S. has struggled.
Why it’s news
As a significant investor in crypto, Wood warns that the U.S. will soon be behind in a growing market while other parts of the world embrace the new form of currency.
“It would be nice if the U.S. were leading this movement, but we’re losing it, and we’re losing it because of our regulatory system,” Wood says.
Exactly how much or how little crypto should be regulated has been hotly debated in the last year, especially since last year’s collapse of the crypto exchange FTX. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently argued that crypto does not require regulation that differs from current securities laws.
Wood added that FTX’s collapse “proved the concept” of cryptocurrencies, along with the recent financial crisis that resulted in the failure of several major U.S. banks. Wood pointed to these examples as proof of the dangers of centralizing financial systems, CoinDesk reports.
“The reason it’s adopted is, first of all, many people like the idea of a decentralized, transparent, auditable monetary system. It was born out of the 2008/2009 crisis, when people just lost all trust in financial services,” she says. “And, very interestingly, it took another two crises within the last year to prove the concept. FTX failed because it was centralized, opaque, and not auditable.”
