Bitcoin, along with Ethereum and Litecoin and the growing number of digital currencies, may now give their sigh of relief as the global community seems to be opening its arms to the once shunned financial means.
The World Economic Forum recently announced the Global Consortium for Digital Currency Governance. The consortium gathers major financial institutions, big companies, governments, central banks, tech experts, NGOs, and academics from the world over. The organization said the consortium would oversee the opportunities presented by digital currencies. The group will set guidance on how digital currencies will be properly integrated into major financial systems.
Among the proponents of the establishment of the consortium is Klaus Schwab who is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the WEF. Also in support of the global consortium Patrick Ngugi Njoroge, Governor of the Central bank of Kenya; Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England; Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Senior Minister of the Monetary Authority of Singapore; Eric Parrado, Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank; Rania Al-Mashat, Minister of International Cooperation of Egypt; Rasheed Al Maraj, Governor of the Central bank of Bahrain; David Marcus, Head of Calibra of Facebook; and Neha Narula of the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology or MIT.
The good news from WEF coincided with a survey from the Bank for International Settlements, which found that major central banks are already experimenting with digital currency innovations. Of most notable is that the emerging markets are already moving from research to public development. As many as 66 central banks participated in the study.
As of 2018, the cumulative market capitalization of all existing cryptocurrencies is $237.1 billion up from $128.78 billion in 2018 and $18 billion in 2016.
Bitcoin alone was valued at $156.7 billion as of January 2020. To compare, the net worth of the world's wealthiest man, Jeff Bezos, is at $115.5 billion. That would mean that Bitcoin is just more than a third larger than Bezo's wealth. Bitcoin is the most popular digital currency today since its launch in 2009.
For additional context, the average budget deficit in the United States is already close to $1 trillion per year. The US Congressional Budget Office that by 2020, the annual deficit could hit $12.2 trillion for the entire year. That could suggest that the U.S. deficit is larger than the combined market cap of all existing digital currencies, six times to that of Bitcoin and four times the market cap of all other digital currencies combined.
