Although the cryptocurrency markets are slow to climb back to the heights they once saw, the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) managing director Christine Lagarde hasn’t taken her eye off of their impact. In an April 10 interview with CNBC, Lagarde noted that blockchain innovators are making in impact on the financial industry and need to be reckoned with.
The interview came on the heels of the “Money and Payments in the Digital Age” panel, which was held at the 2019 Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and the IMF in Washington, D.C. Lagarde commented on how legacy players, like JPMorgan Chase, have had to react to growing blockchain trends by introducing their own offerings. She said:
“I think the role of the disruptors and anything that uses distributed ledger technology, whether you call it crypto assets, currencies or whatever—and it’s far from the Bitcoins we used to talk about a year ago—that is clearly shaking the system.”
She also noted that central banks and regulators have embraced the potential of blockchain technology, and progress has been made by both those groups to understand and grapple with shifting trends. She had previously called on regulators to move into the space and get it under control, and she hasn’t given up on that emphasis, saying:
“We have to be mindful of two things: trust, and the stability of the system […] we don’t want innovation that would shake the system so much that we would lose the stability that is needed.”
Lagarde’s calls for stability are respectable. There’s hardly a way forward for governments and business if developers and regulators can’t decide on a plan to go forward. A very similar sentiment has been expressed by the Bitcoin SV (BSV) development team.
Where she’s wrong though is in thinking Bitcoin is somehow in the past, and it’s understandable if she’s thinking about Bitcoin Core (BTC), which continues to tinker with its protocol while other technologies take huge leaps forward.
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