Elizabeth White, the CEO of The White Company, a New York-based crypto concierge service for upscale clients that helped facilitate over $250 million in digital asset transactions last year, recently shared her insights regarding the future of financial markets with CryptoGlobe.
White, a graduate from the prestigious NYU Stern School of Business, believes “it’s very unlikely at this point” that the nascent crypto industry will overtake, or replace, the world’s trillion dollar financial system. She confirmed that “the volume of international payments in fiat absolutely dwarfs the cryptocurrency markets.”
“Nothing Pushing Adoption” In Crypto At Scale Of Replacing Fiat Currencies
White also questioned:
Why would governments, international companies and people switch from accepted currencies like the US Dollar and use Bitcoin in everyday transactions? There is simply no need to do so, and nothing that is truly pushing adoption at that scale. Of course, Bitcoin will always survive, because it does have a use as [it’s] not being directly tied to the currency of one country, and there are legitimate concerns about whether the USD will retain its global dominance.
According to White, a global digital currency might be issued in the foreseeable future: “The most likely outcome of global adoption would be a World Bank backed digital currency which initially would be based on a basket of the top current fiats and redeemable. That is likely to gain traction (the concept already exists as SDRs) and blockchain technology would enable it to be used for payments easily.”
Importance Of Building A “Full-Stack” Crypto Company
When questioned about her firm, specifically, which appears to building a fully supportive ecosystem – White Wallet, White Pay (for crypto payment processing), White USD Standard (a Stablecoin) (most actively traded asset on the Stellar network), among other things – and how important it is for other businesses to do the same, White remarked:
For the White Company, building a complete ecosystem is necessary for our vision. All of our products [are intended to] work together … and form the core of our technology and business. Whether this is the right strategy for other businesses really depends.
She continued:
In many cases, if they are building applications for specific use, it might be much better for them to work with us to white label certain components. For example, we work with other projects that are building marketplaces, remittance apps, enterprise software etc. All of those [can potentially] benefit from using our technology to power their projects so they don't have to build their own “coin”, their own payments process, their own wallet etc.
She also argued that “this allows them to scale and go to market quickly. On the other hand, there are some projects whose product as a standalone cannot be a successful business. For example, we have seen several stablecoin projects shut down, such as Basis, because they did not have a business or revenue model outside of the stablecoin.”
Leveraging Blockchain Technology Where “It’s Most Needed”
Commenting on what she thinks would be the most useful services and products the crypto industry can offer at this point, White told CryptoGlobe:
The most useful applications in crypto will leverage blockchain technology where it's most needed. For example, image rights management or payments to artists are perfectly suited for blockchain due to the need for large amounts of micro-payments which would be completely impractical in the traditional banking system. The right company will utilize an existing [and established] payments backbone … and build apps on it that are specific to the industry they are targeting.
In response to a question about how she expects the crypto and blockchain space to evolve in the next decade, White said: “I believe that in 10 years blockchain will undoubtedly affect almost every aspect of our life. However, the majority of blockchain use [cases] do not need their own token, so I anticipate [we] would only have 10-15 utility tokens that are actively used.”
“Cryptocurrency Will Be Limited To Bitcoin And Its Forks”
She added: “Therefore, cryptocurrency will be limited to Bitcoin and its forks, Ether a few others such as Basic Attention Token (BAT). The majority of blockchain projects will use stablecoin based payments … It’s also quite likely we will see government backed digital currencies, in which case it is likely that they will take all of the market share and most stablecoin projects will shut down as everyone switched over.”
Cryptocurrency-Related Job Market
When asked about some cryptocurrency-related jobs that she thinks could open up in the future, White predicted:
The biggest growth [potential exists] in security-related solutions for [cryptocurrencies], auditing and fraud detection. The power of blockchain to store data allows us to be much more proactive in stopping fraud and maintaining security. However, traditional approaches (such as forensic accounting) are not well suited to deal with the big data of blockchain, so this will be a new opportunity for people to build careers around helping companies use blockchain data to promote security and transparency.
