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Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick declared he was a “fan” of Bitcoin and the stablecoin Tether, while dismissing other cryptocurrencies as “make believe.”
Speaking on CNBC’s Money Movers podcast, the CEO of the Wall Street broker said that, “I am a fan of crypto. But let's be very specific. Bitcoin. Just Bitcoin,” adding that he was optimistic on the prospect of the Bitcoin halving and the possibility of a spot Bitcoin ETF approval.
“Every four years, Bitcoin doubles the price of how much work you have to do to get a coin,” Lutnick said. “And if you go look at the history of Bitcoin, every time the doubling happens, it does well. So that and combined with the concept of an ETF in America, right?”
That's more or less how it works. The halving is essentially a mechanism to keep Bitcoin inflation in check. Every four years or so, the protocol cuts Bitcoin rewards for miners in half, thereby limiting the amount of new coins entering the market.
There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin minted. At the current speed miners are operating, the next halving is expected sometime in April, with rewards cut from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC for each block a miner processes.
“I think the halving and the way the world works these days, there's a lot of people who are worried about the fact that we run $2 trillion deficits,” Lutnick said during the podcast.
However, he said that he sees Bitcoin as “just a speculative thing,” likening it to Tesla stock. “It’s just something to trade,” he said. “Why is Tesla, Tesla? The answer is, because everybody buys it and it goes up.”
Lutnick also said that he’s a “big fan” of the Tether stablecoin, adding that Cantor Fitzgerald holds Tether’s treasuries. “I keep their treasuries—and they have a lot of treasuries, they're over $90 billion now,” he said.
Responding to JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s recent comment on crypto that the U.S. government should “close it down,” Lutnick argued that the cryptocurrency is "uncontrollable," adding that it Bitcoin could be used by Russian oligarchs who are “scared to death of Putin” to expatriate their funds.
Lutnick claimed that Tether (and, he claimed, Ethereum) are centralized and funds can be frozen at the request of the authorities. “The Justice Department calls Tether, they freeze it—because there’s someone to call. “There's no one to call on Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is a weird thing—but it's only Bitcoin is a weird thing. Ethereum, you can call Joe Lubin.”
Lubin has previously claimed that he and his firm ConsenSys (an investor in Decrypt) have never controlled “even close to half a percent” of the total supply of Ethereum.
Edited by Guillermo Jimenez