Cameron Winklevoss, an American investor and co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, predicts that Asia will be the beginning of the next bull run for cryptocurrencies.
His remarks came at a time when authorities in the United States, particularly the Securities and Exchange Commission, were ramping up their enforcement actions and threatening to clamp down even more.
In a tweet he sent on February 19, Winklevoss said, “My working thesis at the moment is that the next bull run is going to start in the East.”
“It will serve as a sobering reminder that crypto is a global asset class, and that the West, and more specifically the United States, has always had only only had two options: embrace it, or be left behind,”
“There is no way to stop it. That is a fact,” he went on to say.
Chainalysis found that the cryptocurrency market in Central and Southern Asia and Oceania (CSAO) was the third biggest market in its index for 2022. Between July 2021 and June 2022, residents of these regions were compensated with a total value of $932 billion worth of bitcoin.
CSAO was also home to seven of the top 20 nations in 2022’s index, including Vietnam (which ranked first), the Philippines (which ranked second), India (which ranked fourth), Pakistan (which ranked sixth), Thailand (which ranked eighth), Nepal (which ranked sixteen), and Indonesia (20).
In a thread on his Twitter account, Winklevoss stated that governments that fail to offer clear rules and sincere guidance on cryptocurrencies will be “left in the dust” and will miss out on “the greatest period of growth since the rise of the commercial Internet.” He also stated that these governments will also miss out on the opportunity to shape and be a foundational part of the future financial infrastructure of this world (and beyond).
Winklevoss is not the first person to argue that the United States’ attitude to cryptocurrencies would drive away the business, nor will he be the last person to claim that Asia may kick off the next cryptocurrency boom cycle.
According to Brian Armstrong, CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, the strict measures of U.S. authorities, notably the SEC, might further push cryptocurrency firms abroad.
In the meantime, a free market analyst on Twitter known as GCR has predicted that “China, (and Asia in general) will fuel the next run” in a post that they made on January 8 to their 147,300 followers. GCR’s tweet read: “China, (and Asia in general) will fuel the next run.”
“It will take quite some time to melt the cynicism that Westerners have toward this space, but the East is ascending and yearning to flex their muscles.”
In October of last year, Arthur Hayes, a former CEO of the crypto derivatives giant BitMEX, made a prediction that the next bull run will begin when China moves back into the market. He went one step further and said that Hong Kong has a vital part to play in this process. His prediction was that the next bull run will begin when China moves back into the market.
Hayes argued that Hong Kong could become the proving ground for Beijing to experiment with cryptocurrency markets and act as a hub for Chinese capital to find its way into global cryptocurrency markets. Hong Kong is already acting as a testing ground for Beijing to experiment with traditional markets.
During that time, he made the statement that “China has not abandoned crypto; it has merely remained inactive.”
At the beginning of this year, Paul Chan, Hong Kong’s financial secretary, gave a speech on January 9 at the POW’ER Hong Kong Web3 Innovators Summit. In his speech, he revealed that Hong Kong’s lawmakers had passed legislation in December to set up a licensing system for virtual asset service providers.
As a direct result of the modifications to the legislation, a narrative known as the “Chinese Coins Pump” has been gaining traction. This narrative has been gaining traction as speculation grows over whether the regulatory easements in Hong Kong will lead to a massive surge for utility tokens of Asian-focused exchanges.