Blog | Cryptocurrency

Crypto Capitol: Wall Street 2.0

The New Home of Bitcoin

You can predict the future. It requires a lot of research, focus and determination, but the future can be seen. I think my good friend and economist says it best,

"To understand what will happen in the future, it’s first necessary to understand the past. History is like a train. It is propelled forward in a certain direction with a great deal of momentum. It can’t turn on a dime. If you can see where it’s coming from – and how quickly – then you will have a pretty good idea about where it is going, at least in the short term. – Richard Duncan

I think that analogy is perfect. The future does not suddenly jump out from the shadows and surprise us. It is predictable.

Most financial advisors say you can't predict the future. These experts claim you can't pick a market's top or bottom. And since you (or they) can't predict the future, they advise that you just leave your money with them for the long term.

For most people, this is good advice. But for those who want to get rich, being ahead of the future is one of the best ways to amass wealth.

How does one know what is coming next? By looking at the past and seeing how it is moving forward. In other words, by looking at the trends.

The best analysis of trends I know of is Gerald Celente. I’ve asked Gerald to contribute to this blog. Gerald is the founder director of the Trends Research Institute and publisher of the weekly Trends Journal magazine, which I highly recommend everybody get. And the reason I love Gerald so much is, you don't have to worry where he's at. He will tell you. He doesn't sit on the fence. He reads the trends. Then he tells you exactly what he sees.

With a new crypto friendly mayor, look for NYC to try gain back its mojo by becoming a center for crypto markets which exploded into the mainstream in 2021.

It’s become clear that the Big Apple needed to throw its weight behind cryptos. Otherwise, it risked getting left behind as old ways of conducting finance, and even structuring and funding companies, evolve.

New York certainly has tremendous potential influence, given the movers and shakers that inhabit Wall Street. Look for them to pressure pols at the state and Federal level to speed up a regulatory framework that can allow the city to compete for the crypto financial pie.

Approval by the SEC of several bitcoin futures ETFs in October was a welcome event. But NYC will have to flex its muscle much more aggressively.

Enter Mayor Elect Eric Adams. Adams ran on a crypto friendly platform, and he appears to understand what’s at stake.

Adams could catapult crypto to the next level and establish a Wall Street 2.0 by facilitating between Wall Street and crypto project innovators.

Bo Oney, head of compliance at Bitcoin ATM provider Coinsource, one of the first companies to receive a BitLicense in the state, recently laid out the roadmap, commenting to Cointelegraph:

“Other jurisdictions have been very successful in driving innovation through sandboxes, like the FCA in the United Kingdom where early stage tech companies can exchange directly with the leading institutions within their sandbox and test and verify the applicability of solutions in practice.”

Adams will have to build concrete initiatives to leverage the influence of traditional finance. He will also have to persuade influential financial players, and rival politicians like State AG Letitia James, who have been resisting new paradigms.

If he succeeds, NYC has unique advantages that could make Wall Street 2.0 a reality.

Why Cryptos Went Mainstream in 2021

A blistering February run-up, and the realization that blockchain use cases like Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and faster, lower cost cross border payments were gaining on traditional business processes, could no longer be ignored. Ethereum led the way as a platform that could host other “layer 2.0” crypto projects via its “smart contract” software coding capabilities. Many began to understand that cryptos could do anything traditional software could do, while offering a different, decentralized network, investing and profit model.

By early summer, even as Bitcoin and cryptos in general had pulled back from astounding runs, the possibilities of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) were fast emerging.

Everything from music and artwork ownership rights and profits to objects and land parcels in virtual worlds—now tagged with the buzzword

“Metaverse”—could be encompassed by NFT-fueled ecosystems.

AXIE Infinity, a blockchain metaverse game built on a model where players shared in the game profits via an NFT ecosystem, saw its network crypto token go from two dollars to 150 dollars in two months.

Then Facebook announced it was changing its name to META, and the SEC finally approved a bitcoin ETF product for mainstream investors. El Salvador also figured in, making waves in September as the first country in the world to accept a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, as legal tender.

Despite the turkey day slump, many analysts expect cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects to finish the year strong. What started the year at a 1 Trillion market cap will likely end 2021 north of 3 Trillion.

And yet, it’s still only just beginning for the innovations envisioned for blockchains and related DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies).

GERALD’S TREND FORECAST: Mayor-elect Eric Adams understands that the financial sector that is the lifeblood of NYC needs to adapt to the new realities, and offer synergies that can benefit crypto projects, while creating tremendous wealth, and potentially, a fairer system than the current one.

But cryptos are bigger than any city, or even any country. They are disrupting the world. And governments, central banks and even established mega corporations are still grappling with the whirlwind paradigm shift.

They have a sense that they can’t stop the innovations. But they are not prepared to cede their influence and control. Governments will speed up the introduction of official CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies). As the Trends Journal has previously pointed out, the CBDCs they create will be digital trash.

Meanwhile, corporations that have controlled the internet, application ecosystems and social network and media platforms, have abused their powers. They pervasively track their user bases to analyze and profit in various ways off that data.

They have also exerted increasingly Orwellian political control, depressing dissidents and relentlessly propagandizing to further their own objectives.

In short, political, financial, and corporate elites have lots of reasons not to like the crypto revolution.

Many will advocate for suppressing or even banning cryptos like bitcoin,following China’s example.

But that would be a major mistake. China literally can’t embrace decentralized, community driven, permissionless blockchain innovations.

The West, if it so chooses, can. There is a history, especially in the U.S., of personal and entrepreneurial freedom.

More forward-thinking leaders like Eric Adams are needed. NYC could see a powerful resurgence based on the crypto revolution, but Adams won’t be able to do it alone.

The U.S. can pursue a prudent regulatory framework that allows markets and new innovations to compete. It could also seek to return the dollar to a standard of value which can act together with crypto tokens, to ensure the integrity of both. Cryptos can keep the dollar honest, while the dollar keeps crypto tokens honest.

Will it happen?

We certainly can hope.

As I said above, he best way to predict the future is to study the past. My rich dad often said, "There's a difference between a fortune-teller and a prognosticator." That's why he encouraged me to take the study of history seriously.

You will notice that Gerald uses the past to discover the trend leading to the future. Gerald is always looking into the future. And I think we should all do that. The trend is your friend, but only.