Testifying before the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Circle co-founder, chairman and CEO Jeremy Allaire highlighted that the existing financial services system is in dire need of being completely overhauled.
Allaire represented the cryptocurrency industry at a hearing titled, 'Examining Regulatory Frameworks for Digital Currencies and Blockchain' and honed in on 25 years of experience building internet technology companies to explore how digital assets and blockchain have the potential to democratise financial services on a global scale.
“Our existing financial system is in desperate need of transformation. We currently have a global system with limited access and exorbitant fees that impose a tax on real economic activity; a system rife with money launderers and financial crime that is failing 99% of the time to stop bad actors and leads to trillions in losses because our existing data and financial infrastructure are not secure enough," Allaire said.
He predicted a future in which people will become accustomed to using sovereign and non sovereign digital currency models in addition to public and private monies openly and interchangeably.
The CEO also added that he expects payments and value exchange to be commoditised and become free services, in the same way that sharing content or data is, which will "ultimately return hundreds of billions of dollars of value to the real economy, as the fees that people and businesses pay to intermediaries to move value drops to zero."
Allaire continued: "Our capital markets will resemble the Amazon and Alibaba commerce marketplaces or the Google advertising marketplace more than the NYSE or NASDAQ. This will open up capital formation for businesses globally, while creating new ways for individuals everywhere to save and invest into value-producing enterprises.”
“Economic and commercial relationships will increasingly be mediated by smart contracts running on public blockchains, as businesses, labor market participants, and consumers seek to operate in a digital commerce environment with greater security, efficiency, transparency, certainty, and enforceability across borders.”
Concluding his statement, the Circle CEO reiterated the importance of allowing innovators to develop in the US and encouraged Congress to adopt national policies to establish digital assets as a new asset class, developing rules, exemptions and legislation.
"Without a sound, pragmatic, and agile national policy framework for digital assets, I am
concerned that the United States will not be the world’s leader in this critical new technology, that it will continue to fall behind, and that it will not fully reap the benefits of the economic transformation that digital assets will bring."