Since its inception, Bitcoin has broken the boundaries defined by traditional financial instruments and institutions. The peer to peer, open sourced decentralized digital currency has shown that the whole financial ecosystem can also operate without banks and financial institutions. However, bringing about changes in a system is very hard, if not impossible.
Changing the way things work in an organization or a system is a hard task, as mentioned in the earlier paragraph. That’s why there is a separate branch of management called Change Management, applicable for individual organizations and companies. But here we are talking about the whole global economic infrastructure, which is built around so many dependencies. However, Bitcoin, other associated digital currencies, and digital currency technology have been slow but gradually making progress in this regard.
A recent report published jointly by ARK Invest Research and Coinbase offers brief insights into Bitcoin as a new asset class. Aptly titled “ Bitcoin: Ringing the Bell for a New Asset Class ” is a white paper by Chris Burniske, a Blockchain Analyst and Products Lead at ARK Invest and Adam White, the Vice President of Business Development and Strategy at Coinbase. The paper differentiates Bitcoin from other asset classes while comparing it with the 3 predefined asset classes as described by Robert Greer in a paper “What is an Asset Class, Anyway?” in 1997.
The three asset classes are Capital Assets, Consumable/Transformable Assets and Store of Value Assets. However, there are many assets which fall into two or more categories as the boundaries demarcating asset classes may not be applicable to them due to their inherent characteristics and usage by people. The report lists 4 such characteristics that may lead to blurring of lines between asset classes – Investability, Politico-Economic Features, Correlation of Returns: Price Independence and Risk-Reward Profile. Investability
Investability […]
