Cathie Wood, the founder of Ark Invest, believes that the United States is losing the Bitcoin movement due to the country’s regulatory system. Wood stated this at Fortune’s Most Powerful Next Gen conference last week.
She highlighted that the centre of gravity of cryptocurrency is moving away from the United States as Coinbase is licensed to operate in Bermuda while also expanding its operations in Singapore. Wood said, “It would be nice if the U.S. were leading this movement, but we’re losing it, and we’re losing it because of our regulatory system.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been increasing scrutiny on cryptocurrency companies lately. The SEC issued a Wells Notice to Coinbase, which indicates that it is looking into the activities of the crypto exchange. Despite this, Ark Invest still purchased $8.6 million worth of Coinbase stocks last month after the crypto exchange sued the SEC.
Wood argued that the collapse of FTX last year proved the concept of Bitcoin, much like the banking crisis this year. She said, “The reason it’s adopted is, first of all, many people like the idea of a decentralized, transparent, auditable monetary system. It was born out of the 2008/2009 crisis when people just lost all trust in financial services. And very interestingly, it took another two crises within the last year to prove the concept. FTX failed because it was centralized, opaque, and not auditable.”
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading above $26k per coin, up more than 50% since the start of the year.
