European Central Bank President Says Crypto Assets Are Worthless

How much are crypto-assets worth? It depends on the asset and who you ask. Coinbase puts Bitcoin at $29,900. CoinMarketCap says Ethereum is worth $2,003. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, on the other hand, believes that crypto assets are worthless.

Politics reports(Opens in a new window) that Lagarde, who headed the International Monetary Fund from 2011 to 2019 and became president of the European Central Bank the same year, recently addressed the issue of crypto assets for an episode of a Dutch show called “College Tour” which will be aired the night of May 22.

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“I’ve always said that crypto-assets are highly speculative and very risky assets,” Lagarde reportedly said during the interview. “My very humble assessment is that it is worthless. It is not backed by anything, there are no underlying assets to act as a security anchor.”

Lagarde’s comments come at a particularly strange time for the crypto market. The rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, and the growing acceptance of cryptocurrencies by traditional businesses have made crypto assets more popular than ever.

At the same time, the value of many cryptocurrencies has recently fallen in value, with Bitcoin falling from $69,000 per coin in November 2021 to around $29,000 at the time of writing. The crypto ecosystem and its participants have also become increasingly attractive targets for hackers.

Lagarde reportedly told ‘College Tour’ that she was more interested in central bank digital currencies – which are digital versions of established currencies like the US dollar, euro and yen – than unregulated crypto assets that have grown in importance in recent years.

“The day we have central bank digital currency, any digital euro, I will guarantee it,” she said, according to Politico’s report of the interview, which was not released. at the time of writing. “So the central bank will be behind this. I think it’s very different from any of these things.”