Meltem Demirors, the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at digital asset investment firm CoinShares, shared her latest thoughts on Bitcoin during an interview with CNBC on Monday (December 21).
Before joining CoinShares, Demirors “helped build and grow Digital Currency Group, raising capital from the world’s largest corporations and managing a portfolio of 120 companies and 4 subsidiaries.”
Her latest comments on Bitcoin came during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia”.
Demirors started by explaining why she is not surprised that Bitcoin has performed so well this year:
“It has been an absolutely a breakout few days for Bitcoin, but for many us of who’s been in the industry for some time, not unexpected…
“Over the last nine months, we’ve seen just a tremendous amounts of money printing around the world as governments respond to COVID-19 and the resulting economic crisis.
“We’ve seen inflation, not in traditional CPI, but we’ve seen it in asset prices. We were just chatting about Tesla. You know, Tesla’s had an absolutely meteoric rise. The FANGs are at all-time highs. The S&P 500 is reaching all-time highs. All of this in the midst of a pandemic. People are collecting artwork. We’re seeing records in home prices. So, capital is sitting on the sidelines. There’s five trillion dollars of dry powder just waiting on the sidelines to be deployed, and it has to flow into something.
“I strongly believe that Bitcoin will be one of the primary assets where this capital will flow as investors look at ways to allocate in this new world where yields are trending negative. We see fixed income at zero for the next few years at least, and we don’t see that much room for growth necessarily in some of the core equities or even some of the commodities that people have historically invested in.”
She was then asked about concerns some investors might have about proposed KYC compliance regulations (for transfers from exchanges to non-custodial wallets) and price volatility.
The CoinShares CSO replied:
“I actually think [in] 2020 the volatility story around Bitcoin has evolved a bit because everything else has become more volatile, and as we know volatility is a relative measure. So, in the current environment, Bitcoin is actually less volatile than it has been in the past, and if we look at the astronomical rise in the equities market, Bitcoin’s rise actually doesn’t feel so wild.
“If we put Bitcoin and Tesla side by side Tesla is up, you know, over 600% this year; Bitcoin is up about 130% this year. So, speaking of volatility, you know, I think people no longer feel that Bitcoin is such an outlier whereas historically it had been. So, people’s expectations around volatility have shifted, and moreover, I think over the last two years, the industry has matured and evolved a lot.
“And in addition, major investment banks, major banks, have been looking at the space for the last two years. They’ve been getting educated. They’ve been writing research coverage on the topic, and now we have CIOs of all the world’s major investment firms coming out and openly saying Bitcoin is a great place to allocate in the years ahead.
“So, I think we’ve just seen a tremendous shift in attitude. It used to be career risk to get exposure to Bitcoin; now, it is a career risk to not have exposure to Bitcoin. So, the world has certainly changed a lot over the last nine months.”
Yesterday, Demirors tweeted about how by using the Fold Visa debit card (which on average gives 3% cashback in BTC), she can stack sats while paying for goods/services:
