‘Everything will be an NFT next year,’ says Circle chief of product
Rachel Mayers sees corporate and institutional interest in crypto and blockchain create an explosion in use cases and a whole new way of demonstrating consumer loyalty.
Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2022. In this series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchain-related fields tell Forkast.News their predictions for the year ahead.
Rachel Mayers
Rachel Mayers is chief of product at global fintech company Circle, issuer of the USDC stablecoin. The former emerging markets trader for JPMorgan was cofounder and CEO of Trigger Finance, a mobile investing platform that aimed to take the emotion out of investing. Trigger was acquired by Circle in 2017. Mayers has a bachelor’s in mathematics from MIT and a master’s of engineering in computer science from Cornell University.
Predictions for 2022
Institutional and corporate adoption of crypto
“We will see more and more institutions and corporates continuing to pile into crypto markets. … You’ll start to see more of those forward leaning and even mainstream companies continuing to put digital assets on their balance sheet, including Bitcoin and Ethereum and other assets, as well as stablecoins.”
Stablecoins to defend against inflation
“These institutions and corporations will leverage stablecoins as a means to improve costs on their Treasury workflows, as well as start looking into use cases for cross-border payments as they get comfortable with crypto assets. Stablecoins is a means of opportunity for lowering their bottom line for their payments, as well as their corporate treasuries assets.… CFOs, treasurers will have crypto on their mind and put Bitcoin, Ether on their balance sheet. Another key trend that we’ll see is not just outright purchasing the asset, but also entering into crypto capital markets more directly, vis-à-vis stablecoins. We’ll see companies and institutions start to earn interest on their idle cash via stablecoins. With inflation rampant, the search for yield and idle cash is ever more present.”
‘NFTs all ways, all the time‘
“The use cases for NFTs will just continue to explode. While we saw digital collectibles and art being the main use case for companies in 2021, in 2022 we’ll see a ton of more use cases for NFTs. We’ll see retailers like GameStop or a 7-Eleven potentially use NFTs to incentivize real-life transactions, leveraging creators to drive traffic to their storefronts. For example, you could think of an Adidas or a Yeezy NFT that will unlock purchases from Gap stores, or NFTs that unlock exclusive features in Teslas. So brands and creators just reinforcing loyalty community behavior in terms of rewarding NFTs, distributing content, making a purchase. Everything will be an NFT next year.”