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There’s a new sheriff in town. Christine Lagarde. She’s a 63-year-old French lawyer, politician, and economist. She’s currently serving as Managing Director and Chairwoman of the International Monetary Fund. Been doing that since 2011. And now … she’ll replace Mario Draghi as the President of the European Central Bank (ECB). Could this be a big win for Bitcoin and the crypto community?
In April of this year, Lagarde went on record with CNBC to say:
“I think the role of the disruptors and anything that is using distributed ledger technology, whether you call it crypto, assets, currencies, or whatever … that is clearly shaking the system.”
In 2017, Lagarde warned her fellow bankers, politicians, and lawmakers that the power of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology should not be dismissed.
But where some might interpret her comments as warnings and clampdowns on BTC, the general community at large sees them as positive signs.
Winds of Change
Mati Greenspan, a senior market analyst at well-known brokerage firm eToro wrote in a note that what “several people have pointed out to me already is that the next ECB boss is incredibly crypto-friendly,” he says. “Indeed, Christine Lagarde who is set to replace Mario Draghi on 1 November is extremely pro digital assets.“
“Not bitcoin, of course, but she has advocated already for state-backed cryptocurrencies as well as settlement tokens like XRP and JPM coin. We can expect that someone so crypto friendly in such a position will be good for the industry as a whole.”
Diehard Bitcoin maximalists — and perhaps most people in the crypto sphere — will agree that state-backed cryptocurrencies and coins such as XRP and JPM are not, in fact, cryptocurrencies but rather worthless … since they lack decentralization and trustlessness.
Nevertheless, could Lagarde’s views be the first of a series of baby steps? After all, once the masses see state-backed cryptocurrencies put into use — and offered as monetary alternatives — perhaps the thought of using Bitcoin as “digital gold” will be a more comfortable thought.
Billy Bambrough, a contributing writer for Forbes, writes that “she will take a radically different approach to running the ECB.” After all, every one of her predecessors have been economists trained in traditional ways. Perhaps Lagarde, a politician, will have a wider field of view.
Either way, you slice this cake the message is clear: Facebook is going into crypto, J.P. Morgan is going into blockchain, and now the ECB may start dabbling soon enough. I don’t know about you — but each time I peak around that corner…I see mass adoption getting ever closer.
