Arthur Hayes, CEO of BitMEX, says Facebook’s Libra could make central and commercial banks irrelevant, and predicts demise of PayPal.

Arthur Hayes, CEO of Bitcoin-based Peer-to-Peer Trading Platform BitMEX, has said Facebook’s Libra could make both central and commercial banks irrelevant, and asserted that PayPal has no future.

Speaking during an interview with Taiwanese news network BlockTempo TV, at the Asia Blockchain Summit (ABS), Hayes predicted that the Libra payment protocol, even if it ends up being a centralised platform, has the clear potential to relegate banks to “dumb nodes.”

Hayes said he thinks that Libra is only the beginning for Facebook’s project, and that it will end up offering loans and other financial services, saying:

“It has the potential to completely disintermediate commercial banks entirely, and destroy their revenue-generating possibilities,”

His view on PayPal was even bleaker, saying the payment service was “f*cked” in the face of ever fiercer competition from cryptocurrency-friendly services like Square.

Though Hayes has long been an outspoken proponent of cryptocurrencies and a critic of the traditional financial system, recent events are adding more and more weight to his viewpoint.

Earlier today, AYO.NEWS reported that although the European Central Bank has said bitcoin “is not a currency” and has no plans to add it to reserves, on the same day the CEO of a prominent VC firm said it is “single best hedge” against current system (read more).

AYO.NEWS says:

With politicians from the US and UK to France and Russia clearly spooked by Libra, the recent dramatic layoffs at Deutsche Bank (read more), and the increasingly frequent warnings in mainstream media of another global recession, it does feel like we could be on the precipice of a dramatic change.

AYO.NEWS says features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited.