Jesse Powell, chief executive of crypto exchange Kraken, says the firm is seeing a significant uptick in the number of new users as interest in cryptocurrencies grows.
In a new Yahoo! Finance interview, Powell responds to a question regarding how much of the GameStop mania in the equities market has spilled into cryptocurrencies.
“Quite a lot, actually. And people that started trading with cryptocurrencies first are shocked to find out how the equities markets actually work, with so many middlemen in the process, not actually owning your stocks, having someone else technically own them, having someone else custody them, not being able to move them wherever you want instantly.
It’s a very different system, and I think it’s a system that is really no longer necessary now that we have a crypto system. And I think we’d be much better off with a bare instrument system where people can take their shares, move them anywhere they want, trade them anywhere they want, and trade directly on exchange.”
The crypto exchange appears to be benefitting from the increasing interest in the space as Powell confirms that Kraken witnessed a six-fold surge in new sign-ups.
“Yeah. I mean, in the last 24 hours. Something obviously happened that caused a lot of people to come into cryptocurrency just in the last day.”
As for the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, the Kraken executive believes that the nascent sector is poised to disrupt the legacy financial system.
“And Ethereum gives you access to a whole world of decentralized smart contracts, decentralized exchanges, lending protocols. DeFi is really eating the world of finance, whether people know it or not yet. I think 10 years from now, we’re all going to be doing 90% of our financial services on a blockchain.”
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