Bitcoin has equity-like characteristics that are overlooked by investors: CME economist
Should investors see bitcoin as a stock?
As Wall Street comes to grips with the cryptocurrency craze, investors are asking a question that has riven the industry since its formation—is bitcoin a currency or a commodity?
But for Erik Norland, senior economist at CME Group CME, -1.26% which introduced its version of a bitcoin futures contract last Sunday, the cryptocurrency can be also understood as a rare form of equity—one so rare that investors have never seen it before.
What is clear is that if bitcoin is equity, it represents a radically different corporate form than has ever created before.’
Bitcoin BTCUSD, +2.64% was in the throes of a major selloff Friday that took the digital currency below $11,000. It remains down 18% on the day near $12,757, according to CoinDesk.
He described crypto assets as “the first equity ever launched by a non-hierarchical ‘teal’ organization, a self-driving entity with an independent force and purpose, its role in promoting blockchain and the potential consequences of bitcoin and blockchain for the economy.”
Sure, bitcoin doesn’t have a board of directors or reams of earnings statements for analysts to pore over, but it should be rather seen as a corporate organization “whose value derives from the size and health of that community.” Norland borrows the term from sociologist Frederic Laloux, who described a “teal” organization as one that was non-hierarchical much like Wikipedia. That’s in contrast to, say, “red” organizations like tribal chiefdoms and the mafia, “amber” organizations like bureaucracies, or “orange” organizations, like most traditional corporations.
The community surrounding bitcoin give their efforts, time and computing power to the cryptocurrency’s expansion. Though like Wikipedia it draws on the voluntary donations of its adopters, “bitcoin, by contrast, rewards contributors economically in a manner somewhat analogous to [most corporations] but with much stricter, and less political, rules for who gets paid what and why,” said Norland.
To mine the cryptocurrency, a person has to devote their computers to vetting transactions between buyers and sellers through the bitcoin blockchain. The more computers and electricity a contributor could dedicate to mining operations, the more bitcoin they could make.
This is “analogous to stock grants made to employees by corporations. The stock of a company can be seen as an internal currency used to compensate and motivate employees, aligning their interests with those of the organization,” Norland said.
He added for those tempted to characterize the cryptocurrency as an equity could also draw on its built-in cap as evidence. By design, only 21 million worth of bitcoins can be mined and circulated in the market, similar to how a company’s number of shares are limited.
That rules it out from becoming an effective medium of exchange and has led some to treat it “rightly or wrongly, as a highly volatile store of value, sort of like gold on steroids,” said Norland.
But bitcoin’s self-propagating instincts have stoked fears that the cryptocurrency is forming an asset bubble in a class of its own. Though bitcoin and its brethren aren’t big enough to sink the U.S. market into a recession, he said, bitcoin’s soaring rise and potentially crunching fall could destabilize the U.S. economy.