Chamath Palihapitiya has invested hundreds of millions into bitcoin, telling CNBC that it’s tough to enforce a blanket ban on cryptocurrencies as China is attempting to do.
The billionaire investor was asked about this thoughts on SEC chair Gary Gensler saying the crypto market is “rife with fraud” and Ray Dalio saying that regulators will try to ‘kill’ bitcoin if successful.
He said: “I think it’s very hard to kill, so technically, it’s very difficult. Just the way that it’s architected, it is the most profound iteration of the internet that we’ve seen.”
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Google and Facebook dominated the first two versions of the internet by being the platforms on which everything currently exists, while decentralised finance and cryptos are part of the next stage of the evolution to what is known as Web 3.0, he said. The problem with Big Tech dominance is that it’s effectively down to two companies, said Chamath.
The third version “is rebuilding all of that stuff without an obvious leader. It’s completely headless. It’s entirely peer-to-peer. And I think that that’s both scary and exhilarating,” he added.
Regardless, SEC’s Gensler has continued to increase calls for regulating cryptocurrencies and DeFi. Wall Street’s top regulator is signalling that it is keen on cracking down on crypto markets, despite the fact that the industry offers yield-bearing assets to clients unlike their traditional counterparts.
The Social Capital founder said he’s been studying the market for the last 18 months, making him a “huge intellectual bull” in the space. Still, his holdings are largely limited to bitcoin.
“I haven’t put a lot of money outside of bitcoin obviously,” he said. “You know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions – like small capital right now. It could get very big. But irrespective of what I do, I will say is we all need to pay attention to it, because I think the implications are enormous.”
Palihapitiya has been an avid bitcoin support for a decade now. He started investing in the asset in 2012, just a few years after inception. Indeed, Palihapitiya is an OG of the industry, prediciting that the crypto could hit $200,000 in five years. Last week, he said it’s hard to predict where the price could go, however.
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“It’s very hard for me sitting here to give you a price prediction,” he told CNBC. “But I can pretty confidently say that bitcoin, I think, has effectively replaced gold. And it will continue to do so. And so that market cap is just going to grow.”
Bitcoin has risen just under 10% in the last 7 days, exchanging hands at $47,600 per coin at the time of writing.
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