By Nuran Erkul and Emir Yildirim
The global cryptocurrency market could be heading toward a supercycle – a sustained period of growth – fueled by regulatory shifts in the US and renewed institutional interest, Binance’s chief legal officer said.
Speaking to Anadolu on the sidelines of the 56th World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Eleanor Hughes said the sector is emerging from a familiar four-year cycle marked by sharp rises and downturns.
“Given this kind of Trump effect and the passing of the GENIUS bill in July of last year, I think we might see a supercycle in terms of the momentum for the industry,” she said.
The GENIUS Act, short for the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, aims to create a federal framework regulating stablecoins.
“It’s an incredibly exciting time,” she said. “The impact of the GENIUS Act has meant that regulators and institutions from other jurisdictions are now waking up to crypto and really looking at it as a possibility for their financial futures.”
Hughes said clearer regulation is helping unlock broader participation by both institutional and retail investors.
“One of the key components of crypto is that it's a globally traded product, so it is really important that it’s regulated in a very global sense to ensure that the global liquidity pool is not, the advantages of the global liquidity pool, are not cut short,” she said.
She added that growing corporate adoption and expanding use cases for digital assets are likely to support long-term market growth.
Over the past year, the value of Bitcoin – the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization – has fallen about 16%. However, it is up roughly 188% compared with its value five years ago.
- Convergence of crypto, AI
Hughes also pointed to growing links between cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI), saying the two technologies could reinforce each other’s development.
She said Binance already uses AI extensively to boost efficiency, noting that up to 40% of the platform’s code is now AI-generated.
“We’re also using AI in a lot of our compliance programs and in our fraud detection,” she said. “It’s incredibly useful to make our working products much more effective and efficient.”
She added that AI’s role in crypto is still at an early stage, leaving significant room for growth.
“In general, I think there’s only a very small proportion of the crypto market that's dedicated to AI – I think it’s something less than 1%,” she said. “And I think the potential for that to grow is enormous.”