ARK Invest CEO: ‘DeFi Will Actually Get a Boost’ From FTX Collapse

On Friday (9 December 2022), Catherine Wood, Founder, CIO, and CEO at ARK Investment Management, LLC (aka “ARK” or “ARK Invest”), talked about how she expected the several major bankruptcies we have seen in the crypto space would affect the crypto market.

According to a report by The Daily Hodl, during her interview with Yahoo Finance, Wood said:

“We do believe DeFi will actually get a boost coming out of this because it’s so obvious now – decentralized and transparent is the way to go... Those networks didn’t skip a beat. All of their transactions were completed, and there are all kinds of metrics saying they’re getting stronger now...

“I think what we’re learning because of FTX is how much more important fully transparent decentralized networks will be to financial services going forward... FTX, Celsius, 3AC were all closed networks. Opaque systems. You couldn’t see what was going on...

“And what happened, as they [centralized crypto firms] were going down, the people who were on the fully transparent distributed networks were able to get out scot-free. They saw that was going what was going on. There were margin calls for those who were over-leveraged… But the system worked. It didn’t skip a beat. Those other companies went out of business.“

On 23 November 2022, Wood shared her thoughts on Bitcoin and Ethereum during an interview with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Businessweek Radio.

One of the first questions for Wood was why she still trusts crypto. The ARK Invest CEO replied:

“If you look at the blockchains — let’s use the Bitcoin blockchain and Ethereum — what you’ll find is they have the infrastructure. The technology has not skipped a beat throughout this entire crisis. In fact, Bitcoin’s hash rate is at an all-time high, and that is a real indication of the security of the network.

“On Ethereum, we’re seeing the total value staked at $24 billion; that is an all-time high. So we think the infrastructure is working beautifully.“

With regard to Bitcoin, when asked if she stands by her prediction that Bitcoin wil be worth one million dollars per coin by 2030, Wood said:

“Yes. Sometimes you need to battle test, you need to go through crises, to see the survivors, first of all, but really to battle test the infrastructure and the thesis. And again, we think bitcoin is coming out of this smelling like a rose because of what i have mentioned previously.

“And I do think that the one thing that will be delayed is perhaps institutions stepping back and just saying, ‘okay, do we really understand this?’, and once they actually do the homework and see what’s happened here, I think they might be more comfortable moving into into Bitcoin and perhaps Ether as a first stop, as they’ll understand it more.“