In our latest interview, recently hosted at Massari Mainnet Conference, New York City, Michelle Makori, Lead Anchor and Editor-in-Chief at Kitco News, interviews Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo. On the topic of Spot Bitcoin ETF delays, Mike highlights how political pressures are impeding the approval of it, shedding light on Washington’s influence in the matter and sharing his insights on the future Bitcoin price. Additionally, he delves into BitGo’s pivotal role in ensuring the security and custody of digital assets.
Continue reading for an extract of the video and watch it in full here:
Michelle: Regarding institutional clients and investors, what are you seeing in terms of demand with regards to any particular assets in the digital space? Any particular cryptocurrencies?
Mike: Right now, the demand is down everywhere. People sometimes call it crypto winter but that’s actually not where we’re at, at all. Where we’re at is like a massive global crypto economic winter which is of course affecting higher risk assets like Bitcoin and digital assets. If you do break it down though, the institutional side of course is much more in the blue chips of crypto which of course would be Bitcoin and Ethereum and then a quickly falling demand after that.
Michelle: You are the pioneer of multi-signature custody. Briefly explain what that is.
Mike: Back in 2012 I was helping a number of people with storing their assets and as the assets started to grow, I became concerned about having a failure of my controls and my technology so started to look for a better way. I don’t really deserve credit for inventing multisig – I actually just found a corner of the Bitcoin protocol called P2SH (Pay-to-Script-Hash) which is a feature inside of the protocol where you can now start to have multiple keys that interact to secure assets. I packaged that up in a way that was logical and made sense.
Michelle: What about the likelihood of getting a Spot Bitcoin ETF. There are some murmurs that this should happen in the first quarter of 2024. What’s your forecast?
Mike: I’m optimistic. Valkyrie has been out there the longest with a Spot ETF application and now BlackRock a traditional financial firm is very clear they want to go after it. Being in the industry for 10 years there’s something been happening in the U.S which is unusual… a new administration comes in and the rules changed. If all that happened is a new president takes over and now the rules are interpreted completely differently, how do you build business around this? When will we get an ETF approved? I don’t know. There’s something which is not related to the regulation or the legislation going on.
Michelle: Do you have any Bitcoin price forecasts for mid 2024?
Mike: I’m pretty optimistic that we’re going to see a very positive next 18 months. It’s difficult to predict where it’s going. I would actually like to see a bear market continue for 18 to 24 Months. I think we have a great time to continue to build infrastructure so I’m perfectly happy to let it sit for a while…I believe we’re going to see something significant and move upward.
Watch the video now and hear more from Mike in this revealing interview with Michelle!
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