The crypto and blockchain industry is about a fundamental redesign of the basics of how civic society will ultimately function, according to Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire. The CEO provided his stance at a recent panel within the 2019 Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, D.C. on April 10.
Allaire discussed both the potential and the issues associated with crypto and blockchain-related developments in a panel dubbed “Money and Payments in the Digital Age.” Moderated by the IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde, the CFO of Consumer & Community Banking at JPMorgan Sarah Youngwood, the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Benoît Cœuré and governor of the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) Patrick Njoroge also participated in the panel.
When considering the major problem of trust in terms of interconnection between humanity and technology, particularly blockchain tech, Allaire outlined an important concept in the crypto communisty as: “in crypto we trust.”
Allaire elaborated that, in contrast to relying on so-dubbed valuable humans or corruptible intermediaries, the drawing on cryptographic proof would enable “radically more private, resilient, secure, and self-sovereign forms of financial transactions.”
He argued that the crypto and blockchain industry is not only about digital payments, but about a “fundamental new infrastructure for record-keeping of important information and providing a dramatically more decentralized, resilient” basis for building solutions.
Following the panel, IMF’s managing director Lagarde stated that financial disruptors are reshaping the system from within by using distributed ledger technology. Citing major developments such as JPMorgan’s launch of its own stablecoin, as well as new ECB initiatives that aim to provide instant and virtually cost-free value transfers, Lagarde concluded that “it’s far from the Bitcoins we used to talk about a year ago — that is clearly shaking the system.”
Recently, Allaire predicted that stablecoins that use open standards will prevail on the market, which continues to see new entrants. Circle launched its USD-pegged stablecoin USD Coin in September 2018, and six global banks signed up to launch stablecoins on IBM’s now-live blockchain-powered payments network in mid-March.