The world’s largest blockchain and cryptocurrency platform Binance is setting up shop in New Zealand.
The company wants us to buy into a virtual world it claims would help our economy expand.
But tech experts are warning about the risks of investing in something that doesn’t actually exist.
Cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web3 don’t exist physically except in a virtual world.
“This is a new technology for money. If [the] internet was a new technology for transferring information, blockchain, Web3, crypto is a new technology for transferring value,” Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, said.
It means you could buy not just cryptocurrency, but with blockchain and Web3, but the ‘virtual’ equivalent of anything online – from a ticket stub to artwork, to a city like Auckland, then trade it.
“Crypto Web3 technology will power the economy to be ten or a hundred times than the economy we have today,” Zhao told Newshub.
“I think this technology will increase any economy 10-folds easily over the next 10 [to] 20 years.”
This foray into New Zealand will be bound by our regulatory framework.
“We’re fully compliant with New Zealand local regulations, local laws and oversight by the New Zealand regulators,” Zhao said.