President Donald Trump made a lot of headlines recently when he said in a tweet that he is not a fan of cryptocurrency. Many people who work in the crypto field or invest in it were not thrilled with Trump’s comments. Many of them are worried that the leader of the most powerful country in the world saying negative things about crypto could be very bad for the industry as a whole. One person who is not looking at Trump’s comments as a negative is Changpeng Zhao. He is the CEO of a crypto exchange called Binance. He had just the opposite thought. He believes that President Trump tweeting about crypto can only be a good thing in the long run.
Zhao said the simple fact that Trump is taking the time out of his day to tweet about crypto should tell everybody that it has now moved out of the shadows and into the mainstream. He believes that one of the reasons for this is the fact that there is a very high level of transparency in crypto exchanges that you usually do not see in the traditional banking industry. Zhao used his own company as an example of this. Only two months ago, 7,000 bitcoins were stolen from Binance by hackers. The company immediately revealed what had happened to all of their users. Zhao said that traditional banks rarely reveal they have been hacked to their customers. Binance covered all of the losses for their customers.
Changpeng Zhao was asked about the possibility that the United States would completely ban the trading and owning of crypto. He believes that crypto would be able to survive such a massive blow. He does not think a single country banning crypto could totally destroy the industry, even if that country is the United States. He also went on to say that countries that have banned crypto in the past have only succeeded in making the people who live there want it more. He cited China as a key example of this phenomenon. Even though crypto has been totally banned in China, there were more searches conducted there for Facebook’s Libra than any other country.
Zhao feels that Trump’s tweet about crypto gave the industry an amount of publicity that it would never have been able to get otherwise. He said that many people heard about crypto for the first time because of President Trump’s tweet.
