Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of investment bank Goldman Sachs, has always been skeptical of the world of cryptocurrencies, calling bitcoin a kind of bubble. “I don’t like it, I don’t feel comfortable with it,” he said in an interview in 2017.
Now, a few years later, Lloyd Blankfein has changed his mind, claiming that his vision of cryptocurrencies has evolved. “I can’t predict the future, but I think it’s very important to be able to predict the present,” he explained to the CNBC at the same time that He defended that the ecosystem surrounding cryptocurrencies has matured in the last year.
This evolution comes after these digital assets brought trillions of dollars in value and a rapidly growing ecosystem despite the crash of bitcoin and ethereum in recent weeks. The cryptocurrency market capitalization fell below $2 trillion last week after peaking at $3.1 trillion in November.
“It’s lost a lot of value, but at a point where trillions of dollars are contributing and entire ecosystems are growing around it,” Blankfein said. “Of course we have the benefits of instant transfer and credit risk reduction and all the benefits of blockchain,” he explained.
For Blankfein, traditional financial companies, including Goldman, have begun to offer customers ways to buy, trade and hold digital currencies, and a parallel universe of decentralized financial protocols has emerged so that their coins can be lent and yielded.
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