How traditional finance (and everyone it suits) is destroying Bitcoin’s legacy
I hope your Patrimonia (the big annual convention of French wealth advisers, for those of you who went) went well, and I can’t wait to get on calls to hear the latest rumours. I was certainly amused to see that the scoop that broke here (before CFNews, the French dealmaking news site, which forgot to mention it) on the property fund manager Praemia got people talking (in French), especially since it was confirmed by the French investigative site L’Informé.
The big trend emerging is, of course, private equity, which we have been expecting ever since the insurers’ lobbies got it made compulsory in the PER, France’s retirement savings plan, under the Green Industry law. A trend that has even led two of the biggest asset managers in town to launch real-estate PE funds, so as to offer liquidity to the worst funds they have in stock. What if that was the real green finance: recycling the waste lying at the bottom of the portfolios?
More broadly, between the pitiful collapse of equity crowdfunding (which still won’t publish its figures), the coming collapses of those who must not be named, and the arrival of PE funds from Robinhood and Trade Republic, it’s fair to say retail investors are not short of opportunities to lose money serve as exit liquidity invest.
And if there is one other place where retail gets wrung out harder than a mop on flood day, it’s crypto. Because behind the builders, those devs building projects that still struggle to find a business model despite proven and interesting use cases, hide traders speculating on anything and everything, and above all the shadow of institutional finance, which has found there a way to replicate its worst methods.
Among them is today’s subject, on which crypto journalists use and abuse wishful thinking every single day, hailing the revolution that is supposedly on its way, even though it is merely the latest fashionable narrative (as they say).
Yesterday, smart contracts, NFTs, the metaverse or RWAs; today, stablecoins. But what will really change for retail? And above all… what is left of the original promises of Bitcoin, and of Satoshi’s manifesto?