All posts tagged: Dominance

TradFi Trust & DeFi Dominance Favor Ethereum Over Bitcoin; StanChart

TradFi Trust & DeFi Dominance Favor Ethereum Over Bitcoin; StanChart

Published by Jenni Sidey

Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick raised his ETH forecasts in August 2025 to reflect Ethereum’s structural advantages, along with supportive regulatory developments and increased buying by ETFs and DATs. The outlook has turned more nuanced since then. In absolute terms, Bitcoin’s weaker-than-expected performance has prompted Kendricks to downgrade his BTC forecasts and push out our eventual USD 500,000 forecast to 2030 (also downgrading his ETH-USD forecasts for the next few years). However, in relative terms, the SnanChart crypto guru thinks prospects for Ethereum have turned more positive. He has therefore turned more constructive on ETH-BTC, seeing the cross eventually returning to the 2021 highs around 0.08… Source: Bloomberg Kendricks sees three main factors for ETH’s outperformance: 1. Flows We think flows – via ETFs and DATs – are less important for ETH than for BTC, as ETH has a strong use case and fundamentals, whereas BTC functions purely as a decentralised store of value. However, flows still matter – and while they have weakened overall, they are more constructive for ETH than for BTC at present. …

Trump’s ‘American Dominance’ May Leave Us With Nothing

Trump’s ‘American Dominance’ May Leave Us With Nothing

Published by José Betancourt

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the world is divided into three spheres of influence: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, all perpetually at war. Sometimes two of the states form an alliance against the third. Sometimes they abruptly switch sides. No reasons are given. Instead, the Party tells the proles, “We have always been at war with Eastasia.” Newspapers and history books are quickly rewritten to make that seem true. Orwell’s world is fiction, but some want it to become reality. Since well before President Donald Trump’s second term, the idea that the world should have three spheres of influence—an Asia dominated by China, a Europe dominated by Russia, and a Western Hemisphere dominated by the United States—has been kicking around the internet in a desultory way, mostly promoted by Russians who want to control what they call their “near abroad,” or perhaps just want their country, with its weak economy and faltering army, to be mentioned in the same breath as the United States and China. Back in 2019, Fiona Hill, a National Security Council …

The Dollar Is Facing an End to Its Dominance

The Dollar Is Facing an End to Its Dominance

Published by skeptic

2026 will be the year when US dollar dilution—the quiet erosion of its global dominance as countries trade and pay in alternatives—starts to build momentum. The more Washington uses the dollar as a weapon, the more the world builds ways to circumvent it. America’s share of global trade has fallen from one-third in 2000 to just one-quarter today. As emerging economies trade more with each other, the dollar is less central to the flow of goods. Indian and Russian trade now settles in rupees, dirhams, and yuan. More than half of China’s trade now moves through CIPS, China’s own cross-border payment system, instead of SWIFT—the global messaging network long dominated by Western banks. Other trading partnerships like Brazil-Argentina, UAE-India, and Indonesia-Malaysia are also piloting local currency settlements. At the same time, central banks around the world are starting to accumulate currencies other than the dollar as reserves. The dollar made up 72 percent of global reserves in 1999. Today, it’s down to 58 percent—and falling. A currency is safe only if it’s perceived to be …

US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack

US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack

Published by skeptic

In 2026, the leaders of America’s (former) trading partners are going to have to grapple with the political consequences of tit-for-tat tariffs. A tariff is a tax paid by consumers, and if there’s one thing the past four years have taught us, it’s that the public will not forgive a politician who presides over a period of rising prices, no matter what the cause. Luckily for the political fortunes of the world’s leaders, there is a better way to respond to tariffs. Tit-for-tat tariffs are a 19th-century tactic, and we live in a 21st-century world—a world where the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable US companies are all vulnerable to a simple legal change that will make things cheaper for billions of people, all over the world, including in the US, at the expense of the companies whose CEOs posed with Trump on the inaugural dais. In 2026, countries that want to win the trade war have a unique historical possibility: They could repeal their “anticircumvention” laws, which make it illegal—a felony, …

AWS CEO Matt Garman Wants to Reassert Amazon’s Cloud Dominance in the AI Era

AWS CEO Matt Garman Wants to Reassert Amazon’s Cloud Dominance in the AI Era

Published by skeptic

You might think Amazon’s biggest swing in the AI race was its $8 billion investment in Anthropic. But AWS has also been building in-house foundation models, new chips, massive data centers, and agents meant to keep enterprise customers locked inside its ecosystem. The company believes these offerings will give it an edge as businesses of all shapes and sizes deploy AI in the real world. WIRED sat down with AWS CEO Matt Garman ahead of the company’s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to discuss his AI vision, and how he plans to extend Amazon’s lead in the cloud market over its fast-rising competitors, Microsoft and Google. Garman is betting that AI is a service that AWS can deliver more cheaply and reliably than its rivals. Through Bedrock, Amazon’s platform for building AI apps, he says customers can access a variety of AI foundation models while keeping the familiar data controls, security layers, and reliability that AWS is known for. If that pitch holds up, it could help AWS dominate in the AI era. “Two …