Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin and former U.s. President Donald Trump have both slammed digital currencies as a threat to the U.Due south. dollar.

Griffin, the founder of the $38-billion hedge fund Citadel LLC, told the Economic Club of Chicago on Monday that crypto is "a jihadist phone call that we don't believe in the dollar." He expressed his dismay over the younger generation working on dollar alternatives in the crypto sector:

"What a crazy concept this is, that we equally a state embrace so many bright, young, talented people to come up upwards with a replacement for our reserve currency."

"I wish all this passion and free energy that went to crypto was directed towards making the United States stronger," he added.

Griffin, however, doesn't seem opposed to making coin out of crypto in the future. He said that Citadel is withal to follow the plunge of other hedge funds and traditional fiscal institutions into crypto because of the "lack of regulatory certainty."

The hedge fund manager said that U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler was "spot on" in his comments from August when he said that if crypto is going to attain its potential it "needs to come within public policy frameworks."

"Doing so will make information technology a smaller marketplace, because it'll become a far more competitive marketplace when there's regulatory clarity," Griffin said. "And that will be expert. A small market, less people involved who are frankly just trying to make a quick buck."

Meanwhile, former U.S. President Donald Trump warned against the threat to the dollar from China's digital yuan.

During an interview with Yahoo Finance's Adam Shapiro on Tuesday, Trump provided his take on China, the U.S. economy and the crypto sector.

Speaking on the Chinese regime's moves to ban crypto in the country led past Eleven Jinping, Trump said the clampdown was a part of Jinping'southward moves to squash competition every bit he works on "his ain currency, whether it'due south crypto or otherwise," and suggested that the U.S. government should do the same:

"I'chiliad a big fan of our currency and I don't desire to accept other currencies coming out and hurting or demeaning the dollar in any way."

"If y'all look at a monetary organization based on the dollar, if you lot start losing credibility, of a sudden you're going to lose that stiff monetary organisation," Trump said. The controversial former president said the U.S. government's "horror evidence" with the Mexican border and pull dorsum from Transitional islamic state of afghanistan had likewise affected the credibility of the greenback.

Trump is too no fan of cryptocurrency. In late August, he stated that crypto was "potentially a disaster waiting to happen" as he questioned whether digital assets were "false":

"They [cryptocurrencies] may be fake. Who knows what they are? They are certainly something that people don't know very much about."