Tech Tour 2025: Crypto Outlook

Dominic Rizzo:

We had a robust discussion on crypto.

And the first negative I always hear with crypto is it's used for illicit or negative activities. And I would say:

Number 1: The number one currency for illicit activities is the U.S. dollar today, and

Number 2: The dollar doesn't have a blockchain, which you could follow every single transaction. So actually, I think crypto is more secure over time rather than less. 

The next thing I hear is that the government won't support crypto because it means the end of dollar dominance. I think that is actually completely opposite of the truth. I think that that's totally wrong. I think that crypto will accelerate the dominance of the dollar over time. And there's really two reasons. 

One, we have all of these new assets in the world that are primarily priced in dollars. So look at Bitcoin, primarily priced in dollars. I think it's one of the top 10 largest assets in the world today. It's effectively like adding a whole other gold or new oil commodity base that is primarily priced in dollars around the world. 

Second, I think the big use case for crypto overtime is stablecoins. And what is a stablecoin? 

My name is Dominic Rizzo. I'm Italian American obviously, and I carry a lot of cash in my pocket. It literally burns a hole in my pocket every day because I'm not getting my 4% interest that I could be getting in the bag. With the U.S. dollar stablecoin, if I could just pay with the U.S. dollar stablecoin every day, I would be able to collect my 4% interest and pay. So I'd get all the benefits of cash, but I'd be able to be collecting interest along the way.

It's effectively like a money market fund that you can spend. And today, stablecoins are the eighth-largest buyer of U.S. Treasuries in the world. Think about that: the eighth-largest buyer of U.S. Treasuries of the world. The new secretary of commerce, former CEO—the CEO of Canner. Canner does all the custodialization for Tether, which is one of the two big stablecoins in the world. 

So, I think we're going to see an explosion in stablecoin demand, and that's going to really all benefit the crypto ecosystem.

And the third benefit of crypto is just speed and low cost of transaction. Five years ago, you didn't have the benefits of something like Base, which is a layer 2 on Ethereum, or something like a Solana that sped up the transaction cost and bought them down dramatically. And now we bought basically internet scale speed to money. 

And so I think that's why crypto should do really well over time.