Austin Kimm addresses the present status of crypto(Bitcoin), the influence of FTX, and where the space will be in the next months.
Austin Kimm is the Co-Founder and Director of Strategy and Investments of Choise.com. He is a results-driven financial services CEO and business strategist who has helped to establish firms with a total market value of more than US$750 million.
He is enthusiastic about bitcoin and insurance, and he has played a key role in establishing and managing several new insurance enterprises, including one of Russia’s largest insurance businesses. We met up with him to ask him about the present situation of the cryptocurrency business and where he believes it will go in the next year.
What are your thoughts on the present situation of the bitcoin market?
Crypto has expanded at an astounding rate, and while many people have heard of it, it is still fairly little on a global scale, far less than the amount of column inches that the press has recently allocated to crypto concerns justify.
This is because of these interrelated issues.
What exactly are they?
There are no crypto champions outside of crypto. When prospective non-crypto heavyweights, such as Facebook, announced plans to introduce its own coin, Libra, they were met with senate-level hearings within hours. The establishment stands to lose too much if things shift too rapidly.
As a result, the market leaders in this field are crypto exchanges. Of course, they’ve been extending their service offerings, but their ultimate objective is to encourage the crypto community to utilise their exchange instead of someone else’s. They have no general interest in ‘educating’ the broader public about the benefits of cryptocurrency; this is left to smaller, less wealthy enterprises to choose a narrow target market.
Second, regulation is just out of date. Companies are afraid of doing something wrong that may have major consequences, so they set up shop in less restrictive countries. The recent failure of FTX emphasised the fact that FTX was based in the Bahamas and failed spectacularly, although FTX USA, a much smaller sibling business, had no such issues.
Why was FTX situated in the United States? Because they want to develop as quickly as possible, but this is just not achievable outside of the United States. We will not see established financial services firms enter this industry until regulation gets its act together, resulting in more FTX-like circumstances.
