© Reuters
Investing.com – According to Cathie Wood, founder of ARK Invest, the United States is losing its grip on the movement as regulators push big companies in the sector to operate in other countries.
“It would be nice if the United States were leading this movement, but we are losing it because of our regulatory system,” said Cathie Wood, referring to cryptocurrency companies that started to transfer their activities outside the United States.
This is largely due to US regulators, Ms. Wood said, who began to tighten the screws on the crypto industry after FTX’s implosion at the end of 2022.
She cited, for example, Coinbase (NASDAQ:), which recently received approval to operate in Bermuda as the company is under investigation in the United States by the SEC.
Cathie Wood also said the collapse of FTX and regional lenders such as Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank made the case for bitcoin.
“If it is adopted, it is first of all because many people like the idea of a decentralized, transparent and verifiable monetary system. It was born from the crisis of 2008/2009, when people lost confidence in financial services,” she said.
“And, very interestingly, it took two more crises in the past year to prove the concept. FTX failed because it was centralized, opaque and uncontrollable.”
Wood, for his part, has amassed significant volumes of Coinbase shares in its investment arm, Ark Invest, over the past year. The crypto firm is now the fourth-largest holding in Ark’s overall portfolio, with $647 million in shares spread across its exchange-traded funds.
She has also been a strong supporter of bitcoin and predicted earlier this year that the cryptocurrency could hit $1.5 million by 2030.