Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the financial arm of Silicon Valley can’t believe their luck. The cryptocurrency movement, the very rebellion that set out to defeat their hegemony, has provided them with the necessary technology to become even more dominant.
When Bitcoin, the first ever cryptocurrency, was launched in 2008, it was hoped its “Blockchain” technology — which records transactions and cannot be hacked — would spark a digital revolution. If a transaction could be carried out securely without the need for an established bank, it would, we were promised, mark the end of corporate capitalism — and the dawn of a new era of decentralisation.
Just over a decade later, however, Blockchain has become the centre of the financial elite’s new-age banking system. Indeed, behind the scenes, they’re going all in on crypto.
Using its very own cryptocurrency, the world’s largest bank JPMorgan has completed its first “interbank crypto trade” with fellow Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs. They carried out the transaction of JPMCoin, JPMorgan’s version of a digital dollar, using its new blockchain system. And with more than a dozen institutions now signed up to it, exchanging more than $1 billion daily, a digital financial revolution is in the making.
Ordinary citizens, however, won’t be part of it. When it was first conceived, crypto’s leading advocates insisted that we had entered a new era of financial autonomy: all you needed to defeat crony capitalism was a Bitcoin wallet and an internet connection.
But in reality, the crypto rebellion has failed to liberate us, or achieve anything else its founder Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned. Rather than producing a more open, more liberating, more financially free society, the crypto movement has empowered not just another cabal of corrupt financiers, but a hidden cartel of criminals, Wall Street rejects, and what U.S Senator Liz Warren has described as “shadowy super-coders”.
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