According to Stellar, Ripple, Mt. Gox, and e-Donkey co-founder Jed McCaleb, Tron is “just garbage.” McCaleb, who forked away from Ripple to create Stellar due to personal differences with the mission of Ripple’s corporate board at the time, also feels that the crypto market is doing well. He pointed out to Yahoo! Finance that it’s “way way up” even if it’s had some turbulence over the course of 2018.
McCaleb was asked over the phone what his takeaways are from crypto space “beyond the price.” McCaleb said that the way that capital is invested in crypto projects is “wild to watch.” He added that with a reduction in market capitalizations and token prices, things begin to smooth out.
One of the nice things that comes with the market calming down—I still say it’s not a bear market—it means there’s less of that.
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.
McCaleb picked an interesting project to poke at, being that Tron has outperformed Ethereum in terms of actual smart contract development and usage, something that very few people would have seen coming a year ago. Stellar has yet to offer a smart contract development platform on the order of Ethereum or Tron. McCaleb offered no further justification as to why Tron is “just garbage.” Tron founder Justin Sun has gone on record as saying that he wants to “rescue” developers from platforms like Ethereum and EOS.
Stellar “Poorly” Marketed
When asked if people generally know what Stellar is, McCaleb said that he did not think so.
I don’t think they do. We’ve done a pretty poor job of marketing it and telling the world what Stellar is about. I think they have a vague notion that it’s for payments, but I don’t think they know the details and the real power of it. We’re hoping to change that in 2019, but it’s a process.
Research shows that many people have little understanding of Bitcoin or blockchain at all, let alone Stellar. The majority have no interest in blockchain banking offerings. In terms of the options people will eventually choose for making peer-to-peer payments outside of standard US Dollar options, the market is still very much in developmental stages.
End-of-Year Tribalism in Crypto
McCaleb joins developer Bryce Weiner, investor Tuur Demeester, and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin in lobbing verbal grenades here at the end of 2018, a year which has Bitcoin hailed as the worst possible investment choice.
Tribalism in crypto circles is of course nothing new, of course. But later entrants have lent their allegiance to the assets they believe will perform the best. While Stellar remains a top-10 crypto by market capitalization, Ripple, which is extremely similar in design and functionality, has consistently outperformed it on news of business partnerships and integration with banking systems the globe over.
McCaleb and others from Ripple Labs developed Stellar when they felt that the mission of the company was moving too far away from their vision of a peer-to-peer payments system. He later faced a lawsuit over dumping his Ripple.
Stellar’s blockchain facilitated 1,024 transactions on December 30th, an average of 42 per hour. Ripple facilitated 396,354. Comparatively, Tron processed 2,845,490 transactions during the same period, and Bitcoin did 267,463 – all according to Coinmetrics.io, which tracks such information.
At the same time, Stellar had dropped a full penny from its 5-day high of nearly 13 cents at time of writing.
Featured image from Shutterstock. Jed McCaleb image from LinkedIn. Chart from TradingView.
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