*American foremost billionaire investor and businessman Bill Gates has defended digital banking efforts he’s supported through his philanthropic foundations, describing them as ‘hundreds of times more efficient’ than the tumbling cryptocurrencies

Isola Moses | ConsumerConnect

Billionaire investor and businessman Bill Gates has dismissed cryptocurrency projects such as nonfungible tokens as shams “based on the greater-fool theory.”

ConsumerConect learnt Gates stated this at a climate conference Tuesday while reviving past criticisms of the digital assets.

He said: “Obviously, expensive digital images of monkeys are going to improve the world immensely,” Gates said sarcastically while speaking at an event in Berkeley, California hosted by TechCrunch. He said he’s neither long nor short the asset class.

The billion investor was said to have criticised crypto before, sparring with billionarire businessman Elon Musk, in 2021, over whether Bitcoin is too risky for retail investors and the environmental harm of mining coins.

While speaking Tuesday, June 14, 2022, as the Founder of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate-focused fund he began in 2015, Gates also noted the difficulty of recruiting Silicon Valley engineers to work in industries like chemicals and steel production in need of lower greenhouse gas emissions.

In the meantime, Bitcoin plunged more than 15 percent Monday and another 5.4 percent Tuesday, part of a broader crypto selloff fueled by higher than forecast US inflation and the halt of withdrawals by the lending platform Celsius, report said.

Popular NFT collections, including the celebrity-favored Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), are also being hit hard.

Gates as well defended digital banking efforts he’s supported through his philanthropic foundations, which he described as “hundreds of times more efficient” than cryptocurrencies.