Alexander Lebedev is the owner of the British “London Evening Standard” and “The Independent” and the Russian “New Daily”. He praised the potential of cryptocurrency and smart contracts in the financial revolution.
On October 13, in an 1800-word long commentary published in The Independent, the billionaire predicted that blockchain technology would break a parasitic global banking oligopoly phenomenon he described, and said “Due to the application of blockchain technology and smart contracts, the financial industry does not need to hire a large number of employees.”
Although he believes that the current “explosive growth of DeFi platforms is promoted by the rapid influx of liquidity” and “cannot continue indefinitely,” he said:
“The technology contained in these infrastructures provides a lot of opportunities to rebuild the global financial system.”
Lebedev said that smart contracts allow customers to obtain financial services “without the participation of intermediaries in the form of banks” and prevent “greedy bankers” from stealing customer funds.
Lebedev also revealed that he did an “experiment”, invested $100,000 in a liquid mining agreement in Estonia, and was surprised by the rapid benefits it brought. He is now considering establishing his own “independent decentralized financial ecosystem.”
The platform will seek to provide “a full range of traditional banking services”, including “currency exchange, deposit, lending, settlement and cash services, as well as local and international transfers.”
The former banker pointed out that global regulators are paying more and more attention to crypto assets. He mentioned recent measures taken by the legislatures of Germany, China, Switzerland and the United States, which recognized stable coins and security tokens.
“The next step of the platform is to’digitize’ physical assets, including production facilities, real estate, goods and services, and store them in a distributed ledger.”
Lebedev believes that cryptocurrency has potential partly because, in its current form, he asserts that the global financial system is “leading the world economy to disaster.”
Lebedev has been in the banking industry for 25 years, and in 1995 he acquired Russia’s third largest private bank-the State Reserve Bank. He claimed that he had noticed a shift in modern banking, and that some competing banks were trying to “steal customer funds.” Lebedev added that since the 1990s, thousands of Russian “bank thugs” have embezzled “more than $100 million in customer funds”.
He said that due to reduced access to financial resources, “billions of people have been completely cut off from banking services.” The reason for their economic exclusion is that the banking class has been unable to steal funds from them.
“Maybe we are about to usher in a real revolution in the international financial system and the end of bank hooligans.”
