Danny Masters is a former JPMorgan energy trader and the chairman of CoinShares, crypto investment company from London.
The firm is the first one in the world that traded Bitcoin and Ethereum funds, and now it sees massive traction for digital assets among legacy financial service companies.
Addressing the advantages of distributed ledger technology
Masters left JPMorgan Chase back in the 1990s in order to be able to launch his very own commodities fund, Global Advisors which owns a 75% interest in CoinShares.
Now, CoinShares has more than $1 billion in crypto assets after making a move towards Bitcoin and cryptos long before Wall Street was interested in it.
Masters spoke to Business Insider, and he explained that CoinShares gives investors professional-grade access to cryptos and at the beginning, it was hard to digest.
“You needed to be a true believer, and you needed to suck it up for 2014, ’15, and ’16. And then ’17 was just off the charts good,” he said.
That was the year Bitcoin surged to an all-time high of nearly $20,000.
“When you look at how the Chicago Merc or the New York Stock Exchange work, there is a bunch of electronic piping that goes around making the transfer and the trading of these shares happen, and that is a considerable infrastructure,” Masters said in a new interview with Bloomberg.
He also said that there had been talk about deploying distributed ledger technology to these exchanges to get the advantages of distributed ledger tech: low latency, portability, transferability and more.
Coinbase can easily become a competitor for NASDAQ and the NYSE
Masters brought up Coinbase which have put together a registered broker-dealer, a registered investment advisor in all 50 states.
He also said that also considering Coinbase’s 12.5 million customers, you can basically say that they have their own stock market and once they will issue tokens on it, it will become a true competitor for NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange.
Listen to the complete interview here.
