One of Australia’s most successful tech entrepreneurs has said he wants to create Australia’s first crypto bank.
Talking today to Australian news site news.com.au, 26-year-old tech innovator Fred Schebesta – co-founder of hit comparison site, Finder – spoke about his passion for the space and how he plans to “build the crypto bank of Australia” by partnering with an existing bank.
Already having purchased a “significant” personal holding in West Australian bank Goldfields Money, the millionaire investor explained why a bank is a logical move for what he sees as an industry set to explode:
As crypto adoption takes off and it becomes bigger and bigger, people are going to [need] certain services [like] custodianship, cold storage, escrow, exchange and spending. And then lending — lending is what makes the fiat economy [government-backed currency] work, and once lending really cranks up in crypto, that’s the thing that will basically take this to a whole other level.
Telling the site that he could have the crypto bank up and running “within 18 months”, Schebesta argued that Australian banks are “scared of cryptocurrency” and that the opportunity is ripe for a company with insider knowledge of crypto to seize the opportunity.
Only the Beginning
Schebesta is generally very optimistic about the entire blockchain and cryptocurrency industry.
Finder launched its own cryptocurrency comparison service in September – seeing traffic growth of ten times that of its other offerings.
Launching an over-the-counter (OTC) crypt exchange – HiveEx – in February, Schebesta explained why he is still so bullish on the space:
Remember, people said bitcoin was a bubble at $US10, a bubble at $US100, a bubble at $US1000. After it went to $US100 it went down to like $US12, that’s way lower than $US20,000 down to $US6000.
Adding that:
The interest has boomed. I was at [crypto conference] Consensus in New York, there were 8000 people there. It took 30 minutes to get up the lift. New technologies are being built, it’s like going from Basic to DOS. Bitcoin’s like gold, it will just sit there and do its thing and keep on going, I don’t think it will die.
