Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller thinks that stablecoins are “incredibly useful”—so much so that he expects them to become the backbone of the financial system in the coming decades. “I assume our whole payments systems will be stablecoins in 10 or 15 years,” he said in a newly posted video interview with Morgan Stanley, calling the fiat-pegged tokens highly productive thanks to their efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The former hedge fund manager did not speak as highly about the rest of the crypto industry.
“It’s a solution looking for a problem,” he said when asked what came to his head about “crypto” in a word association game. “I’m very sad that it ever happened as a store of value, ‘cause it wasn’t needed.” “But it’s a brand, and these people love it, so it’s going to be a store of value,” he added, not specifically singling out Bitcoin or any other tokens. The commentary jives a bit with previous remarks from Druckenmiller, who noted in 2020 that he believed the “Bitcoin bet” could work better than a bet on gold, should the established store of value and precious metal ultimately go up.
At the time, with Bitcoin priced around $15,000, he cited the token’s illiquidity and volatility as positives that could lead to a stronger rise. As Bitcoin trades around 5x higher now, it seems the billionaire’s thesis may have played out in the last six years. But even then, Druckenmiller noted that the top crypto asset was an unnecessary creation, saying, “I don’t understand why we need this thing.” Six years later, the asset has climbed to a $1.4 trillion market cap as it changes hands around $71,520 on Friday, a rebound of around 8.5% in the last 30 days. At that price, BTC is still down around 43% from its October all-time high of $126,080. On the other hand, the growing market cap of stablecoins has largely been up and to the right, now sitting around $315 billion, according to data from DeFiLlama. That marks an increase of more than $180 billion in circulating supply since the beginning of 2024, and high-ranking officials like U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent think that mark could triple by 2030.
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