Let’s say you’re a crypto-curious investor and feeling a little overwhelmed by the unfamiliar landscape of digital currencies and uncertainty about the industry’s future. Amid such confusion, a voice of reason would be welcome. Enter Itay Goldstein, the finance department chair, Joel S. Ehrenkranz Family Professor, and recent host of Wharton’s Ripple Effect podcast series Future of Finance: The Rise of Crypto & Digital Money — a four-part deep dive into cryptocurrencies with perspectives from an array of experts, including Jessica Wachter, former chief economist at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Dr. Bruce I. Jacobs Professor in Quantitative Finance, and Timothy Massad, former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “With all of the energy and attention that’s going in the direction of crypto,” Goldstein says, “we felt it would be good to focus on that industry.” Here, he shares takeaways from those podcast conversations.
Some investors still have a limited understanding of cryptocurrencies.
“A lot of people are attracted to crypto without fully appreciating the uncertainty and what’s at stake, and they end up losing a lot of money,” Goldstein says. “We saw the same thing with the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s.”
Much of the cryptocurrency industry’s promise has yet to be realized.
“When Bitcoin started, the idea was that it would be a means of payment: You could go and buy things with Bitcoin, and it would replace money,” Goldstein says. “But we’re clearly not there. So then the target moved a little bit, and people began talking about cryptocurrencies as a store of value, something you invest in. But this also became a problem; it’s very volatile.”
The impact of cryptocurrency regulations adopted by U.S. lawmakers earlier this year is unclear.
“A lot of immediate regulatory concern has been lifted, and the industry has more freedom and flexibility to try different things,” Goldstein says. “At the end of the day, long-term regulatory questions are still there. If we end up seeing a big crypto crisis, or if we don’t see a clear use case for cryptocurrencies, then we’ll see some regulatory uncertainty emerge again.”
The potential upside of digital currencies remains high.
“I do appreciate the innovation and the attempt to reimagine the financial system,” Goldstein says. “There is a seed of a good idea there, and potentially groundbreaking technology that will allow us to do finance in a different way.”
David Gambacorta is an investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and a freelance writer.
Published as “A Professor’s Perspective on Crypto” in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of Wharton Magazine.
