Pippa Malmgren – Digital Currencies Will Drive the Next Industrial Revolution

Cryptocurrencies and digital finance (“DeFi”) will catalyze an economic transformation on a par with the Industrial Revolution, according to Pippa Malmgren.

Philippa “Pippa” Malmgren is an economist and is the founder and CEO of IndraNet.ai, a Wisdom Exchange. She is a senior partner to The Monaco Foundry, a start-up incubator, and a special advisor to Avonhurst, a legal and consulting firm in the UK specializing in deals, policy and capital raising.

Malmgren was a keynote speaker at the Exchange ETF conference in Miami on April 12.

We are at a historical moment, she said, and about to adopt a new standard of money and a new financial system. That last happened in 1834, when British moved from “tally sticks,” which were a primitive physical record of assets and debt, to paper currency.

The British government was in debt and introduced paper money to pay it off. That scenario parallels the challenges facing the U.S. and its mounting fiscal deficits, she said.

“We are doing the same thing now,” Malmgren said. In Britain, it led to the Industrial revolution. “We are the same point, with blockchain or something like it and digital money.”

Unfortunately, Malmgren did not back up those predictions with a thesis that connected digital currencies to innovation on a par with the Industrial Revolution. Americans already operate in a society where transactions are routinely conducted electronically, via credit and debit cards, PayPal, Venmo and electronic transfers. That technology has made transactions convenient, but there is no evidence that it has been a driver of innovation – except among the providers of the payment technology.