Eric Trump: Banks could disappear in 10 years because of the growing popularity of blockchain technologies

What’s new? US President Donald Trump’s second son Eric has criticized the traditional banking system for being inefficient and focused on the super-rich. In his opinion, banks will disappear within 10 years if they fail to integrate blockchain technology. In an interview with CNBC, he noted that the crypto industry offers decentralization of finances and eliminates the need for intermediaries, which makes peer-to-peer transactions cheaper and processed with greater speed.

Material by CNBC

What else is known?

“There’s nothing that can be done on blockchain that can’t be done better than the way that the current financial institutions are working. SWIFT is an absolute disaster,” Eric stated.

Eric Trump’s comments came ahead of his father’s planned visit to the Gulf region from May 13-16, during which he will stop in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Trump will be the first US president to visit the UAE since George W. Bush Jr. in 2008.

Eric, along with his brother Donald Jr. are part of the team behind DeFi protocol World Liberty Financial, which is promoted by their father. The founders are Steve and Zach Whitkoff, Zach Folkman, and Chase Herro.

The project is positioned as an alternative to traditional banking for ordinary citizens. It has a native token WLFI and a dollar-pegged stablecoin under the ticker USD1, whose capitalization a week after its launch exceeded $2 billion.

Eric Trump has become the first member of Metaplanet’s bitcoin advisory board

The council’s work is designed to help the company become a global leader in the bitcoin economy

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For its part, the Bank of Italy pointed to the risks of integrating cryptocurrencies and stablecoins into the broader economy in a new report. The regulator emphasized the danger of the growing popularity of stablecoins with a peg to the dollar, which use US government bonds as collateral. Thus, failures in stablecoins or the underlying bonds could have “repercussions for other parts of the global financial system.”

"The strong growth of Bitcoin and of other crypto-assets with high price volatility means risks not only for investors but also potentially for financial stability, given the growing interconnections between the digital asset ecosystem, the traditional financial sector and the real economy,” the report notes.

Earlier, the European Central Bank (ECB) also said the threat of a stablecoin-friendly US policy to the EU financial system. The US Senate will vote on a bill to regulate stablecoins, known by the acronym GENUIS, by May 26.

ECB has said it needed to tighten MiCA to protect against threats from dollar-pegged stablecoins

In turn, the European Commission said that the bank misinterpreted the norms of the law, and in its current form it is already capable of protecting the bloc’s economy

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Citi Bank expects that after entering the mass market, stablecoins could reach a capitalization of $1,6 trillion by 2030.