Even though the cryptocurrency market is expanding at an unprecedented rate and becoming more adopted, not everyone is fully convinced of its role, including Ken Griffin – the founder and chief executive officer of the investment firm Citadel Securities.
As it happens, the Citadel CEO finds it ironic that people use assets like crypto to pull away from the government, which, according to him, they still rely on to solve so many other problems for them, as he told the host Scott Wapner during CNBC’s ‘Delivering Alpha’ conference in an interview published on September 28.
According to Griffin, a lot of the government stimulus and borrowing at the start of the pandemic “cycled back into speculative assets, in many cases into NFTs, into crypto, into meme stocks. (…) Money misallocated in speculative assets doesn’t create jobs in the long run, doesn’t help to create the long-term prosperity that makes America the country that it is.”
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The irony of crypto-centrism
On the other hand, the Citadel chief said he understood some of the reasons why people turn to crypto, even if he found them ironic:
“I see my younger colleagues much more crypto-centric than my older colleagues, and for good reasons, including, ironically, sort of a Libertarian view of the world.”
As Griffin further explained, the irony is also in the fact that the people are turning away from the government despite their trust in its ability to sort out a multitude of other issues:
“You know, as our government gets bigger and bigger, a certain number of people sort of feel like, ‘you know what, I want the privacy and I want to be — I want to pull away from government.’ (…) So what’s interesting is we see people pulling away from big government when they look at assets like cryptocurrency, which is a real irony given how people view government can solve so many other problems.”
Citadel’s crypto history
Meanwhile, it is worth mentioning that Citadel is one of the financial heavyweights which, along with Charles Schwab, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, and Virtu Financial, recently formed a compliant cryptocurrency exchange called EDX Markets, after announcing it in early June, as Finbold reported.
In early August, a petition was launched demanding that the chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, be fired over failing to protect ordinary investors from the fraud caused by short selling and dark pool misuse allegedly committed by Citadel Securities.
