Family Office & Yacht Management Management Legal Analysis Profile
Family Office & Yacht Management
the rest of the world. If the trades are settled
instantaneously then the requirement for
margin or collateral largely goes away. This can
potentially free up trillions of dollars trapped
in the old system and level the playing field
between the big banks and new startups
offering innovative financial services.
In the new world, you can essentially
have a wallet or an app on your phone
where you might have some Bitcoin,
you might have some Ethereum,
you might have a couple of other
cryptos. You can have some cash in
there, you can have digital gold, you
can have digital Apple shares, you
can have virtually any asset in there.
If you then wanted to go into an
Apple store, for example, and buy a
new iPhone you could walk in there and
say I’ve got to sell 5.3 Apple shares, so
you tap that into your phone app, and the
sale goes through immediately. There’s a cash
balance in your account on the phone and you
can use tap and pay technology to then pay for
the phone and walk out of the shop with it.
Another way of looking at this is that the price
of an iPhone X is $1,000; GBP1,000; 5.3 Apple
shares; 0.2 Bitcoin or 0.9 oz of digital gold.
Enabling and empowering people to move
fluidly from one type of investment to another,
to cash, to retail, is going to revolutionise the
entire financial industry.
In five years we’ll be seeing these apps coming
out. I’ve got a beta version of an app doing
this on my phone at present and it just blows
everybody’s socks off when you say: “Look I’ve
just converted from gold to Australian dollars
and I’ve just sent 500 bucks to you.” What you
can do is just awesome.they’re converting their traditional and crypto
assets into sterling and paying for everything
in sterling. When they go to Europe it’s into
euros. When they go to any country the local
currency will be immediately available for
them. The technology works to make
life a lot easier. Rather than having to
have a separate bank account in every
country people can have one app that
becomes global.What growth do you anticipate in
the crypto market going forward?
At present the market is trading
say an average of 15 billion US
dollars a day in cryptos. If I am to
predict, I think that number will go to
100 billion and then to a trillion over
the next few years as traditional assets
become tokenized and traded in the
same way as cryptos.
Today the available market is really, really,
really small. The available market that we’ll have
in five years is going to be 100 times the size
of what is it today because of the way in which
it works. The volume that will be traded like
cryptos in five-years is going to be much, much
bigger than it is today.Tony Mackay is the founder of
cryptocurrency exchange Kryptos-X.
Previously he was the Chairman of
Europe and Chi-X Europe, and Chief
Executive of Chi-X Global at Instinet.He began his career in stockbroking in
Australia in 1980 and has worked for
traditional and electronic brokerages in
Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London.What are the advantages of buying assets
using cryptocurrency?
When people say they’ve just bought a yacht
or a car or a house using crypto it’s a bit of a
stunt really because they’ve really converted
the price from US dollars into Bitcoin and said
that’s going to be the price, and I’m sure they’ve
adjusted that price as Bitcoin has gone up and
down.
Where crypto currency becomes really useful
is if, for example, somebody takes a yacht on a
round-the-world trip, they can have their portfolio
on their app so that when they’re leaving the UK©IstockphotoYI28_pp26-29 CRYPTO STUFF _v5 NB.indd 28 09/06/2018 00:04