According to Sam Bankman-Fried, a 29-year-old billionaire, and the CEO of crypto derivatives exchange FTX, the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin (DOGE) is the asset of the year.

In a recent interview on The Jax Jones and Martin Warner Show, the young executive explains how economic conditions in the past year have driven retail investors to bet on the Shiba Inu-themed crypto asset.

“If there’s like an asset of the year for 2020 and 2021, it would be Dogecoin. That is the asset that accurately reflects our current economic climate. That is the asset that we have all chosen and that we deserve for better or for worse.

I don’t say that as an endorsement or an anti-endorsement. I’m not trying to take a position on it. I’m just saying everything we as a society have decided over the last year has been dragging us closer and closer to the Dogecoin financial standard.”

He also points out the reason why retail investors started to pay attention to Dogecoin.

“What have we done as a society that makes, you know, when did we swipe right on Dogecoin?

There’s just been a ton of things and Elon, he’s actually powerful. He is the most influential man in the world when it comes to financial assets right now. His tweets move markets. He chose Dogecoin, and no one was surprised.

Everyone kind of knew he’d choose Dogecoin… and we chose Elon. We signed up for this. We signed up for some amount of self-aware mockery for some amount of, you know, a sense of humor and for some amount of challenging norms and saying, ‘Okay, but seriously, maybe what makes your thing better than Dogecoin? You know, no, really answer me that. Yes, I realize it’s a meme. My question still stands.’”

Bankman-Fried talks about the importance of social media as well, highlighting that social media channels such as Reddit and Twitter have provided the retail investors a platform to come together and challenge institutional investors.

“All of a sudden for the first time, 10 million people all across the world can get together and tweet at each other and, you know, agree via sh*tposting memes on Reddit and Twitter about what they’re into, and they can coordinate not explicitly even just implicitly. You put those 10 million people together, and even if they only have a $1,000 each, that’s 10 billion dollars of inflows, and that rivals the inflows that you get from the biggest institutions in the world.

All of a sudden, you have this global decentralized network of bored people at home on their computers who collectively are the biggest pension fund, the biggest mutual fund, the biggest ETF (exchange-traded fund) in the world, and they don’t have the same fiduciary duty to shareholders that Fidelity has. They don’t have the same institutional history. They can buy whatever they want, and if they want to buy a Dogecoin, they’re going to buy a DOGE.”

Source: FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried Calls Dogecoin the Asset of the Year – Fintechs.fi