Pierre Person: “If traditional banks don’t adapt, they will be wiped off the map”

Leaders League: Is it possible to be both a representative of the state and espouse a movement that sees itself as both decentralized and anti-establishment?
Pierre Person: That’s a very good question. The important thing to bear in mind is that, at its roots, blockchain is a quite libertarian project, began in 2008 by a group of individuals who saw a fault in the global financial system, from a currency standpoint, and sought to rectify it.

With technology, it is the application and usage that determines its purpose. Blockchain does not have a political goal. That being said, the decentralized structure of blockchain will help give back control to the individual. 

In attempting to regulate this technology, aren’t we in danger of stifling innovation?
I am of the opinion that regulation is extremely important since it puts in place a protective framework for investors, and this boosts confidence. This is the case with Binance, one of the main crypto-asset exchange platforms, which started out life as an illegal operation in the Virgin Islands, but one with a market cap in the hundreds of billions.

For cryptocurrency companies to be able to move on to the next stage of their development, there needs to be regulation, in order to reassure an individual interested in investing in digital money. Once this technology becomes institutionalized, it will allow it to expand further.  

Can bitcoin be considered a reserve currency, as is currently the case for gold.
Yes, intrinsically. The main purpose of cryptocurrency is to get around the problem of monetary erosion. There is a high level of correlation between bitcoin and high-risk assets. However, it has so far held its value in the wake of the Fed’s announcement that US interest rates would be increasing.

Digital assets have the power to revolutionize traditional finance

The strong long-term decorrelation of this asset compared to more traditional ones gives it considerable inflation-hedging capabilities. It is for this reason that institutional investors have been considering putting a proportion of their capital into bitcoin, to spread investment risk.  

How important a part will digital assets play in the economy of the future?
Up until now the possible uses of digital assets have been little explored. To answer your question, I have four main points. As regards the market, this technology can create a marketplace via the issuing of financial securities, for example. Blockchain has the potential to modernize this sector and in fact the AMF [the French stock-market regulator] is broadly in favor of such a change taking place.

From a banking standpoint, I am convinced that if traditional banks don’t adapt, they will be wiped off the map. The intermediary role in financial operations played by the banks has no place in this new world, because operations, such as loans, will be decentralized. In addition, currency will no longer be the prerogative of the state, as has been the case for the past number of centuries.

The real question that needs answering is do we want money to remain the responsibility of the state? We can observe at the global level that a sort of monetary war is taking place, and it will have very real consequences in terms of sovereignty. At present we Europeans are mere bystanders.

With respect to NFTs, the market has an overabundance of liquidity at present, and I am not convinced that the current prices at which digital works are changing hands are sustainable. In so far as this technology will make it possible for interoperable hyper-liquidity, where forgeries will no longer be possible, authenticity can be assured and transactions far more flexible.