As Turf Wars Mark the End of 2018, Crypto Interest Set to Rise Among Institutional Investors
January 2, 2019 by Paul de Havilland
2018 ended with thought leaders hurling abuse at each other and rival projects even as institutional investors eye increased crypto holdings in 2019. Is the crypto space actually ready to become more mature?
Also see: EOS Exchange Coming Via Huobi Pool in Early 2019
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Tron, Bitcoin Accused of Being ‘Garbage’
In an end of year interview with Yahoo! Finance, Jed McCaleb, a long-time player in the cryptocurrency industry, having cofounded Mt. Gox, and then moving onto Ripple before departing for his own project, Stellar, lashed out at Justin Sun’s TRON:
“Ninety percent of these projects are B.S. I’m looking forward to that changing. Things like Tron, it’s just garbage. But people dump tons of money into it, these things that just do not technically work.”
Only a day earlier, Bryce Weiner, CEO of AltMarket, Inc. told followers “Bitcoin is a garbage network.”
Bitcoin is a garbage network.
It’s suffered from years of over engineering and ethical decay.
It has neither earned nor deserves the right to be a global reserve currency.
The only thing democratic about Bitcoin is that we can fork the source code and do it over again.
— Bryce Weiner (@BryceWeiner) December 30, 2018
As a developer of a project working on a new consensus algorithm referred to as “proof of fan”, the audacious attack on the OG crypto was probably ill-fated. After a year of catastrophic token launches, the forthcoming Icon token claims to:
“end the “biggest fan” debates once and for all. With blockchain technology, fans can prove how long and how much of their favorite artist’s token they have owned!”
Biggest fan debate? Proof of fan? Sounds ludicrous.
Institutional Investment Coming to Inject Some Maturity Into the Space
PwC executive Henri Arslanian told Bloomberg Television in Australia that:
“I think there is a lot of exciting things that the crypto ecosystem is looking forward [to] in 2019. One of them, I think, is really the entry of institutional players. Some of them may decide to launch their own solutions, like Fidelity did here in the US… others may try to partner with some of the other crypto firms… And others may try to invest in crypto companies a bit like Goldman did with BitGo and Circle. This is very good because it will bring the kind of level of institutional expertise and experience to the sector which is something the crypto industry needs.”
Not to mention a much-needed dose of level-headedness. Caleb & Brown, an Australian based digital asset brokerage company, saw:
“Superannuation and pension funds, investments via trust structures and Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) [take]… over from individual accounts as the majority of new clients of our brokerage in the last six months.”
ICE’s Bakkt will also launch some time in 2019, its most recent update indicating another expected delay. Bakkt will almost certainly raise interest among institutional investors. With the apparent rise in interest among institutional players, 2019 could be a year that heralds a new era for cryptocurrency: one of mainstream acceptance, or at least the green shoots thereof. Although, we have heard all that before.
Have your say. Has the insult hurling become a bore? Will more institutional investors help offset or reduce it?
Images via Pixabay
