'We’re seeing a lot more buyers rather than sellers,' on the crypto market: Voyager Digital CEO

Steve Ehrlich, Voyager Digital CEO, joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down his thoughts on the current crypto market during the recent dip in the market.

Video transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: I was blown away when I was looking at your platform, 1.6 million people trading every day. And you have 60 different coins that they can access. So what are you seeing in real time in crypto? I know there's the volatility. But those 1.6 million, they can give you some insight the rest of us don't have.

STEVE EHRLICH: Yeah. Well, thank you very much for having me today. I definitely see the McAfee story throwing all of us for a little bit of a loop there. But what we're seeing on the platform is now, we're seeing a lot more buyers rather than sellers. So the net deposits coming on our platform are far exceeding, something like 6 to 1, for people bringing more money onto the platform.

And what they're buying-- our top five coins in the last 24 hours have been Ethereum, Bitcoin, Cordano, Dogecoin a bit, and then the new coin we just put on, the Shiba Inu, that coin as well. So we're seeing a lot more buying in those coins, as people are looking for this rebound right now. And I think that's what's happening.

We saw Bitcoin go below 30. It went up to 34. We're settled in at 33. And we see some long-term opportunity for gains for customers from where it's sitting today.

SEANA SMITH: Steve, when you take a look, though, at the news out earlier this week, clearly it did spook investors just a little bit. Of course, the debate is up whether or not that was the new investors or people that have been long-term Bitcoin bulls now for quite some time. But when you take a look at what's happening overseas, any worry that something similar could potentially happen here in the US when it comes to regulation?

STEVE EHRLICH: Look, there's regulation in the US right now. All of us who are acting properly are registered with FinSEC. And we're registered in all the states we operate in. There's active regulation in the industry today.

Do I think that more regulation is coming? I do. And I've spoken to my congressmen and senators about that. And I think it's going to be thoughtful regulation that happens over the next few years. Chairman Gensler will put some more regulation in place. That's good for the business. I think that the opportunity for more consumers to come in will happen when there's more regulation.

We're seeing adoption. The numbers show somewhere between 6% and 10% of all Americans have some crypto right now. And that's just a small piece of the overall population. So there's a lot of opportunity for more people to participate in this, especially when regulation comes.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Steve, we listen to people on all sides of this discussion, some who say, look, Bitcoin specifically will go to 100K. Others say, no, it's going to crash back down to around $14,000. And then those in the middle who say, look, this isn't a currency, but it is an asset.

If you're trying to make a logical, long-term investment in this asset-- and I'm talking specifically to Bitcoin-- wouldn't that regulatory hurdle pose a threat to its long-term growth?

STEVE EHRLICH: Actually, I think it's the opposite. I think people should come in. And what we recommend using our platform is recurring buys. So you put a little bit amount of money each week into Bitcoin. Regulation, people tend to forget that Bitcoin's only been around 10 years. If you compare it back to the stock market, it was around 200 years before it had any electrification.

And regulation means that the government thinks that there should be opportunities for consumers to invest. But they want to protect the consumers and retail consumers. That's a good thing, which means the price will go up over time.

Also, there's only going to be about 21 million bitcoins ever in circulation. So just simple supply and demand economics say there's going to be more people wanting to get a limited supply of coins. So that price should go up. Will it go up to 100,000 in the next few weeks or months? It could be years. But I think over time, the price will increase.

SEANA SMITH: So Steve, the volatility, the regulation concerns obviously nothing new when it comes to crypto. But what does this mean though, do you think, for some of the secondary coins out there?

STEVE EHRLICH: As we have 62 coins on our platform, we're seeing consumers adopt and buy some of the altcoins, quite a few of the altcoins because there's a lot of good projects out there that really get the support of the communities. Ethereum is being one. Remember, Ethereum is also the backbone for all the NFTs in the marketplace. Cardano, Polka Dot is something that's popular for us.

And again, these are smart contracts that will enable easy use in the long-term future. The question I've asked people all the time is that, you go, you buy a house. And there's a title search. Why does it take 30 days-plus to do a title search these days when it could be on a smart contract and you can have it done in hours, maybe minutes?

So the backbone of all the cryptocurrencies and the smart contracts and the alternative coins are really important for our whole economic system on a long-term basis.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Steve, I hope you'll come back. And the next time you are here, perhaps we can have a broader discussion too about the US regulators one day opening up to ETFs so that more of us can get in to crypto.