Coin is the ‘best invention’ after fiat – co-founder of Tether
According to Tether's CEO, the introduction of fiat currencies like the US dollar is the biggest innovation since the invention of fiat and will enable new methods in global finance in the coming years.
William Quigley, co-founder of stablecoin giant Tether and decentralized exchange WAX, believes that the world's economies will shift to tokenized money in the next 10 years. He praised tokenization technology in a fireside discussion at the FT Crypto & Digital Assets Summit on May 9.
“It's rare that a perfect technological innovation has no barriers. You only leverage fiat when you tokenize it,” said Quigley, adding that tokenized fiat or stablecoins such as USDT could one day earn interest or provide profits by holding the digital asset.
The founder of Tether said:
“I wondered why my checking account wasn't paying me interest. And they said, well, you get the amazing benefits of electronic banking. So, at some point, that might happen. But now people are so happy with their dollar tokens that the idea of giving up interest on them was not really a compelling issue.
Quigley went on to say that there are “trillions” in American bank accounts that pay no interest. According to the executive, people prefer such accounts because they value the idea of banking services.
“They want to go to their ATMs at home. You want to use ACH. So they are paying for those services by forgoing interest,” he said.
During the fireside chat, Quigley shared how he got involved with crypto and Tether, the firm behind the largest stablecoin by market capitalization and the most traded cryptocurrency asset today.
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Quigley mentions that his passion for gaming inspired many of his ideas. “In gaming in the late '90s, the concept of in-game items became a big deal,” he said, adding that many people wanted to trade items in-game, and trading in the marketplace was ineffective.
“So my partner came up with the concept of running a digital pen service that would allow people to pay for these things with cash. Now, at the time, this goes way back, but there wasn't an easy way to use fiat on the Internet,” said Quigley. A co-founder of Tether, he also worked at PayPal. He stated that he was one of the first institutional investors.
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