Tezos Co-Founder: U.S. ‘Consecration’ of Crypto Means Less Regulatory Ambiguity

Bitcoin's recent “parabolic” price rise reflects increased regulatory certainty in “major markets like the U.S.,” said Tezos co-founder Kathleen Breitman.

Speaking at Web Summit, Breitman argued that, “The parabolic rise in Bitcoin’s price this week reflects this lack of ambiguity in the U.S.,” arguing that, “now that there's a lot less ambiguity as to the status of cryptocurrencies in major markets like the U.S., there will be more things like tying real world assets to cryptocurrencies, because it will be easier to navigate the regulatory environment.

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The Tezos co-founder added that adoption of “things like ETFs, and more broadly, prediction markets and stablecoins, is really encouraging that there might be other use cases coming down the pipe,” such as mainstream crypto gaming. Meme coins, she said, are an “extension of NFTs” for building communities, “in effect, making a peer to peer, stateless nation.”

Crypto has been “an over capitalized industry for the last five or six years,” Breitman said, arguing that while there’s “some economic value or some sort of problem that it's solving,” that’s been overshadowed by a “speculative fervor.”

She likened the effects of crypto’s overcapitalization to the 19th-century railroad boom, when passengers on major rail routes had to switch trains because “they actually hadn't standardized the rail sizes between the two places.” That situation’s mirrored with the crypto industry, where, “the downside of being grossly over capitalized is that there's no strong incentive to come to good standards between competing entities or competing projects.”

With regulatory certainty, Breitman said she hopes for more focus on crypto’s “technical underpinnings” such as wallet infrastructure. She added tha, “Hopefully we'll see a bit more serious players coming into the space as a consequence of its consecration by, implicitly, the U.S. government—or at least that's the way the market’s been interpreting the Trump administration coming in.”

Edited by Stacy Elliott.