Off The Chain With Anthony Pompliano Season 1 Recap
This is a recap of the 38 episodes from the 1st season of Off The Chain with Anthony Pompliano. We provide the episodes as well as an answer from each guest to these 3 questions:
- What are you most excited about going into 2019?
- What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018?
- What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019?
Mike Dudas — Crypto’s PR Crisis
Published August 31st, 2018
Mike Dudas is the founder of the The Block, a crypto-focused community to help people cut through the noise. He previously co-founded Button and worked at Venmo and PayPal. In this conversation, Mike and Pomp discuss:
- The role of media in the crypto industry
- Why Coinbase is the most important company in the space
- Which media outlet he thinks is more entertainment than substance
What are you most excited about going into 2019
The Block is growing, and we have expanded our research/analyst team so that we can offer a premium product, beginning in February. This will make fund-quality research available to more people in the crypto ecosystem.
The transition from projects announcing fundraising and future products to projects announcing live products and improvements / scaling to existing products.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
The crypto ecosystem is about people. They drive the software, systems, governance, economics and everything else that makes the protocols, projects and products tick. Focus on the people and their incentives, and you can find the deeper truths about everything being said and built.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
We need MORE reasoned, data-driven skepticism today more than ever. But we will receive LESS as more things become regulated, fail and flounder. We’ll see more opinion/heated-takes than we will see reasoned, signal-driven skepticism. Obviously, The Block will aim to cut through the BS to provide it. But we still won’t be able to avoid noise in 2019, and I expect to see more of it than ever.
Michael Moro — The Institutionalization of Crypto
Published September 11th, 2018
Michael Moro is the CEO of Genesis Global Trading, an institutional trading firm focused on providing two-sided liquidity for digital currencies on a daily basis. In this conversation Pomp and Michael cover:
- Crypto market infrastructure
- How Genesis grew so quickly
- What OTC trading is
- When institutional money will enter the market
What are you most excited about going into 2019
Honestly, I am excited that we’re all still here. I say that somewhat sarcastically, but it’s an incredibly bullish sign to me that there are so many companies and projects that can not only survive a 90% downward price movement, but continue to build and grow. Not sure there’s many other industries (if any) that could say the same thing.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
With all of the fiscal crises occurring around the world (Turkey, Venezuela, Argentina and many others), I feel as though sound money is needed more than ever.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
Retail will remain the main driver of the next crypt bull run, not institutional investors. Institutions will participate and affect the magnitude of the run, but renewed interest from retail will be the initial catalyst.
Arjun Balaji — The Institutionalization Of Crypto
Published September 4th, 2018
Arjun Balaji is the CIO of Shomei Capital, a crypto-Asset investment and consultancy firm. His conversation with Pomp covers:
- Bitcoin’s black hole pull
- Why enterprise blockchains and utility tokens don’t make sense
- Work on privacy
What are you most excited about going into 2019
A year ago, I was most concerned about Bitcoin’s fungibility and scalability. I think both will see material improvements in 2019 with sustained growth of the Lightning Network and Schnorr signature implementation (with down-stream privacy improvements from there). I’m also excited to see a lot of 2017’s zombie projects slowly die out as the broader crypto markets capitulate on their wild theses to focus more strictly on what’s working as the “killer app”: non-sovereign money and trust-minimized global settlement.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
The biggest thing I learned about 2018 was that when your stoner friend from college is buying a Lamborghini, it is definitely time to sell. I kid, I kid. I did learn about human behavior: cryptocurrency markets are a prime place to observe cognitive dissonance in real-time. It has been illuminating to see project teams double-down on flawed or broken hypotheses. The lack of intellectual humility in the broader “cryptocurrency industry” is really alarming.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
Most investors and speculators are underestimating the probability the bottom is already in (generally discounting it to 0 entirely). There are too many crypto-adjacent businesses to do this, the sheer gravitational force of these businesses alone may mean the bottom was in before anyone realized it.
As this small excerpt doesn’t do Arjun justice, check out his Crypto Theses for 2019
Marty Bent: The Secrets Of Bitcoin
Published September 5th, 2018
Marty is the Editor In Chief at Marty’s Bent, a newsletter about Bitcoin. He’s also the host of Tales from the Crypt, a podcast about Bitcoin. In this conversation, Anthony Pompliano and Marty cover
- All thing Bitcoin
- Crypto mining
- Why hash rate is way more important than people are giving it credit for
What are you most excited about going into 2019
Most excited to see the conversation around getting Schnorr signatures added to the Bitcoin protocol heat up. Hopefully, we’ll see the emergence of competing BIPs that aim to add Schnorr signatures and how we may implement it via a soft fork. On top of that, I’m excited to see the competition around consumer hardware (plug-and-play nodes + hardware wallets) increase as pioneering teams continue to bring products to market. Also, I will be following the continued development of the Lightning Network very intently. It will also be interesting to see if Bitcoin reacts (or doesn’t) to a potential macro meltdown.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
2018 proved that we are still very early in this game. There is a massive need for better ways of educating the masses about Bitcoin, it’s potential, the risks involved when buying it, and the underlying ethos from which it was birthed. There is so much noise in this “space” and we are in need of much better filtering systems.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
Kobe is the GOAT.
Travis Kling: The Secrets Of A Crypto Trader
Published September 19th, 2018
Travis Kling is the Founder and CIO at Ikigai Asset Management. In this conversation, Kling and Pomp discuss
- Token structures
- Price movements and outlook
- Value accrual
- The importance of BitMEX in Asian algorithmic Market Makers
- What needs to change for crypto to have sustainability.
What are you most excited about going into 2019
Separating the wheat from the chaff.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
BTC’s value proposition relative to its status quo (i.e., gold) is currently much more compelling than any other crypto asset’s value proposition is relative to its unique status quo. Money is the killer app for DLT right now. The rest of the use cases are much further off. That isn’t to say this can’t change — this space iterates at breakneck speed and other, non-monetary use cases for DLT could come from behind and gain mass adoption more quickly than a non-sovereign, hardcapped supply digital money. But at the moment, this technology’s most apparent use case is money.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
Many use cases for DLT are more deflationary in nature than value accruing. For example, if a rent-seeking middleman is charging $100 for $10 worth of services, a DLT may very well be able to provide that service for $2. But that’s not so much a great investment proposition in the DLT as it is an awesome deal for the consumer. Open-sourcing often means margin compression by way of market competition. Many use cases for DLT and crypto fall in this category. In 2019, crypto investors will turn towards projects that have an inherent moat on top of their open-source foundations.
Zac Prince — The Future Of Crypto Lending
Published September 13th, 2018
Zac Prince is the Founder & CEO of BlockFi, an asset backed lending platform for crypto. In this conversation, Anthony Pompliano and Zac cover
- How asset backed lending works in crypto
- The psychology of a borrower
- Tokenized stores of value.
What are you most excited about going into 2019
Developments across the industry that lead to more utility value, real world use cases and user adoption for leading cryptoassets.
A green year in terms of price performance vs the bear market of 2018.
Launch of multiple new products at BlockFi including interest bearing deposit accounts and credit cards.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
I think 2018 was an interesting year for separating viable companies / projects with strong teams from opportunists that were attracted to quick money grabs made possible via the ICO market.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
The same one that I mentioned on the podcast! I believe that a tokenized dollar will become that largest blockchain asset at some point in the near future. You will see companies emerge that incorporate dollars and Bitcoin in ways that weren’t possible when you had to rely on traditional banking rails. This will be a net positive for cryptoassets values, global access to financial services and the crypto sector as a whole.
Frank Chaparro: Behind the Scenes of Crypto Media
Published on September 24th, 2018
Frank Chaparro is a crypto-journalist currently at The Block. He previously covered the intersection of Crypto and Wall Street at Business Insider. In this conversation, Promp and Frank cover:
- The current state of Crypto Media
- What it takes to develop sources
- How you deal with sources who lie to you
- What happened when the CFO of Goldman Sachs called Frank’s article fake news
- Who the most important people in companies in Crypto are
What are you most excited about going into 2019
I recently joined Josh King on The ICE, NYSE’s podcast, and one of the main points I made was that institutional players have yet to prove themselves. ICE’s Bakkt has extended its launch date into the year, ErisX won’t go live until the second half of the year, and Seed CX has relatively few clients trading on its spot market. Broker Tagomi just went online in recent weeks. At the same time, Coinbase has curtailed its institutional ambitions. What I am most excited about is to see whether an institutional-aimed business can get traction, irrespective of price. As a journalist, either direction is great for telling stories. Also, SCOOPS!
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
As a journalist, the biggest thing I learned in 2018 was to check my assumptions at the door when reporting on any given company or aspect of this space. Crypto is one of the fastest moving industries in financial services and tech. And that means even if things — a company’s business strategy, an asset’s price, or figure’s stance on an issue — seem to be following a certain course that doesn’t mean it will persist. Anecdotally, I wrote a story about how traders were adjusting to the low volatility environment (shaking up their strategies) at the end of the summer. Days later bitcoin tanked from 6K, where it had traded for months, to 4K then to 3K.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
Pineapple Pizza is very good.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The Best Piece Of Investing Advice
Jim O’Shaughnessy is a Wall Street legend and the Founder, Chairman, and Chief Investment Officer of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, which has $6.2B in assets under management.
Jim’s areas of expertise include quantitative equity analysis, portfolio management & investment models. He’s authored several books and been awarded numerous patents for investment strategies. In this conversation, Anthony Pompliano and Jim discuss
- The psychology behind investing
- The similarities between the Dot Com Bubble and crypto
- Whether or not Bitcoin can act as a store of value.
What are you most excited about going into 2019
Every year above ground is, by definition, exciting.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
I learned, yet again, that human nature never changes even though the majority of humans think it does.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
Most of my opinions are unpopular. “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. ~Mark Twain
Andy Bromberg: The Future of Crypto Fundraising
Andy Bromberg is the CEO of CoinList, a trusted platform for running compliant token sales. In this conversation Andy and Pomp cover
- The Stanford Bitcoin Club
- Airdrops
- Security tokens
- Accreditation laws
- Why some companies in crypto are doomed to fail
What are you most excited about going into 2019
I’m most excited to see everyone go heads down and build. We’ve had a year or two of hype and attention — which is great — but it’s distracted many people (although certainly not everyone!) from building product and technology. 2019 will be focused on that.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
I learned that it’s possible, even this early in the industry, for certain assets to prove out their real, fundamental value proposition. Bitcoin, in particular, is increasingly detached from the rest of the space and seems to be forming more solid ground on which to stand.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
That many of the most widely-acclaimed teams (sorry, no names!) are on their way to 0 — and quickly. A number of top projects are focused on fundamentally flawed value propositions or value accrual strategies. Being early and being smart isn’t enough — the strategy also has to be sustainable.
Jake Chervinsky: Defending Crypto From The SEC
Published on September 26th, 2018
Jake Chervinsky serves as Defense Counsel in U.S. government criminal investigation’s at Kobre & Kim, a law firm based in Washington, DC. In this conversation, Jake Chervinsky and Anthony Pompliano discuss
- Securities Law, accreditation standards
- Terrorism financing
- The applications of the Howey Test to crypto
- Why Blockstream may be the most important company in the industry
As Jake says: he’s a lawyer, but not your lawyer.
What are you most excited about going into 2019
I am most excited for the possibility that, in 2019, we will finally resolve whether and when digital assets qualify as “securities” under US law. That issue has created an amount of regulatory uncertainty that threatens to stifle innovation and push entrepreneurs out of the United States. This year, I hope the US government implements a clear set of standards governing how securities laws apply to the crypto industry — through either Congressional legislation or the SEC’s rulemaking process — so that we can enter 2020 free from lingering securities disputes.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
I learned that the crypto space has a long way to go before it’s mature, efficient, and reputable enough to challenge incumbent stakeholders in legacy industries. At the beginning of 2018, the inflated crypto market had many people convinced that a crypto-powered future was right around the corner. Over the past year, many projects have been exposed as failures or outright frauds, which has greatly reduced interest in digital assets among businesses and consumers alike. I think it will take longer than expected for the crypto industry to rebuild its credibility in the wake of the ICO bubble and prove its superiority over traditional systems.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
I think that working with US regulators and elected officials — rather than around or against them — is critical to the future of the crypto industry. Yes, decentralization should theoretically render a blockchain immune to government interference. However, given the current state of the technology, the US government could still severely restrict the impact of digital assets if it chose to do so. Even though I know cryptoanarchists won’t like it, I think it’s crucial for us to spend more time in 2019 explaining to government actors why they should support innovation in this industry.
Gabor Gurbacs: What’s The Latest With The Bitcoin ETF?
Gabor Gubacs is Director of Digital Asset Strategy at VanEck where he focuses on the Bitcoin ETF. Gabor is one of the masterminds behind the $50 billion asset management move into digital assets. In this conversation, Anthony Pompliano and Gabor discuss:
- The ridiculous accreditation laws
- Bitcoin and traditional ETFs
- Why regulators are currently concerned about crypto
- Gabor’s prediction for the growth of retail crypto projects
Bonus Video!
See Gabor’s outlook heading into 2019
Muneeb Ali: Abuse Of Power Through Centralization
Published on August 29th, 2018
Muneeb Ali is the Co-Founder of Blockstack, a new internet for decentralized apps. In this conversation, Pomp and Muneeb discuss
- The problems with today’s internet giants
- Why you should care about decentralization
- What scares him about the future built on a blockchain
What are you most excited about going into 2019
I’m excited about decentralized apps starting to bring real utility to end users. It’s possible that 2019 is the year where privacy/security becomes a key requirement for users when selecting apps to use. As of Dec 2018, there are decentralized alternatives to Google Docs, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, DocuSign, 1Password and others available on Blockstack — I’m excited to see a subset of these apps potentially get real usage in 2019.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
The importance of focus. We had Milestone-based triggers in our token offering raise meaning that the bulk of the capital was locked until we could build and successfully deploy the Stacks blockchain (Milestone 1). Most of 2018 we focused on this goal and got it done. Investor protection was the original reason for this approach (investors get up to 80% of their money back if we don’t deliver) but focus ended up being another benefit. Blockstack is one of the handful projects that raised a token offering in 2017 and delivered on the technology in 2018 — thanks to focus.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
For crypto to reach mass adoption, the crypto projects will need to figure out how to be compliant with regulators. You can only exist in weird corners of the world as crypto anarchists; compliance is necessary (and even beneficial) for reaching mass market. As Gemini recently put it “even revolutions need rules”.
Austen Allred: How to Fix Our Broken Education System
Published October 17th, 2018
Austen Allred is the co-founder and CEO of Lambda School, a full computer science education that’s free until you get a high paying job. In this conversation, Allred and Pomp discuss
- Y Combinator
- The challenges of building a startup
- What it takes to train a computer engineer
- Why the current student debt problem is so bad
- How Lambda School is helping hundreds of people avoid debt and build a better career
What are you most excited about going into 2019
Making Lambda School bigger and better
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
If you’re ever stressed, it’s probably because you need to hire someone
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
McDonalds is delicious
Downtown Josh Brown: Where Does Crypto Fit in Your Portfolio?
Published October 10th, 2018
Josh Brown is famous on Twitter and is the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management. In this conversation Brown and Pomp discuss
- Ghosts
- Aliens
- Bubbles
- Stocks
- Bitcoin
- Tesla
- Tilray
- Amysterious fidelity investment report that disappeared
- How Jim Kramer was once harassed in Costco.
What are you most excited about going into 2019
Knicks getting another lottery pick, possibly signing Durant.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
Volatility never goes away forever, something always sparks it.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
We’re headed toward a recession.
Edward Woodford: Building A Regulated Crypto Exchange
Published October 22nd, 2018
Edward Woodford is the co-founder of Seed CX, an institutional trading platform that recieved approval from the CFCT as a Swap Execution Facility (SEF) in August 2016. In this conversation, Edward and Pomp discuss
- Crypto financial products
- Emerging markets
- How institutional investors think
- Why crypto is such an interesting problem for anyone building regulated exchanges
What are you most excited about going into 2019
The dam continuing to break on institutional adoption of digital assets, especially groups who have remained under the radar in the press. 2019 will see more and more institutional investors feeling confident and secure in trading larger and larger amounts of digital assets.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
Continue to surround yourself with people who are driven.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
That falling Bitcoin prices have had some positive effects, because they’ll ultimately force the market to mature. When Bitcoin prices were soaring, many investors were indifferent to money lost through hacking or other nefarious activity, because the returns they were seeing were good enough to outweigh those kinds of concerns. When the returns these investors are earning slow down to what they might expect from more traditional assets, their ability to tolerate the potential of losses from hacking and other preventable causes is much lower.
Nathaniel Whittemore: Marketing in A Blockchain World
Published October 24th, 2018
Nathaniel Whittemore is one of the best known voices in crypto. He has pioneered Long Reads Sunday, where he summarizes the top news of the week in a single long thread. In this conversation, Whittemore and Pomp cover everything from Bitcoin to crypto-marketing to fraudulent ICOs.
What are you most excited about going into 2019
The signal-to-noise ratio is so much better now. The people who have stuck around and are building are building things that are, pound for pound, more interesting and important than was the average last year. Plus, bear market means more time to ask interesting hard questions and have important debates. Basically, I just think bear markets are more interesting times to learn and build, and expect great things from 2019 that prep us for whenever the inevitable next market surge happens. Lastly, I guess one specific thing: more projects getting out of the realm of theory and in to real life — whether that’s new protocols coming to market or crypto getting into the hands of regular people in unstable monetary regimes. Whatever happens, it will be good to have the balance between speculating about what happens and what really happens shift.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
The identity of the industry is still up for grabs and the battles to control the narrative are going to do nothing but get more important. It may feel like we’re just talking to ourselves, but there is a genuine question of how people from outside our niche discover crypto and what they think when they do.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
The best way to learn is to find the smartest people you disagree with and follow them religiously. Also, *not* having to argue about every damn thing on Twitter is a superpower.
Caitlin Long: Wall Street Isn’t Bitcoin’s Friend
Published August 27th, 2018
Caitlin Long spent 22 years on Wall Street, including Morgan Stanley, where she was Head of Corporate Strategies and Pension Solutions. In this conversation, Anthony Pompliano and Caitlin discuss
- Why Wall Street’s involvement may hurt Bitcoin (rather than helping it as many think)
- Why the Bitcoin ETF could actually be a bad idea
- How Wall Street could actually kill Bitcoin
What are you most excited about going into 2019
Continued improvements in blockchain protocols (such as Lightning Network & many other similar upgrades that solve real problems).
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
That, until coin lending volumes really took off in 2018, cryptoassets were essentially “pure” assets whose prices had not been significantly impacted by rehypothecation and similar shenanigans that create more claims to the asset than the quantity of assets. As coin lending volumes rocketed up in 2018, we started seeing these shenanigans enter the crypto world — and although I can’t prove it empirically, logic says these activities had a negative impact on cryptoasset prices in 2018 (because increasing the supply of something causes its price to drop, all else equal). I don’t believe it’s an accident that the peak in bitcoin’s price essentially coincided with the CBOE futures contract announcement, or that a near-term peak in bitcoin happened the day before the Bakkt announcement. It’s counterintuitive but true — these Wall Street practices are bad for bitcoin
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
That the crypto industry isn’t ready for fiduciary investors to enter (e.g. pension funds and mutual funds). We saw Yale and Harvard’s endowments enter last year, but they did so via fund structures instead of direct investments. Putting on my former hat as a fiduciary of pension plans and an endowment, the crypto custody industry’s business practices fall far short of what fiduciary investors will need. As an industry we need to up our game — and I believe we will! Keep an eye on Wyoming to define the standard here!
Murad Mahmudov: The Ultimate Bitcoin Argument
Published October 31st, 2018
Murad Mahmudov is one of the highest convicted Bitcoin Maximalists in the world. In this conversation, Murad and Anthony Pompliano discuss
- What Bitcoin is
- How it works
- The importance of its deflationary monetary system
- Why all Fiat Currencies are doomed to fail
- How central banks and institutions should be thinking about Bitcoin
What are you most excited about going into 2019
Accumulating a lot of Bitcoin. This whole year will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
I’m not a hodler. I enjoy trading this market looking for alpha to diminish my cost basis in the purchase of the best asset in history (BTC).
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
The bear cycle is going to last longer and premiun alts will survive it.
Brandon Arvanaghi: Building the Gemini Dollar
Brandon Arvanaghi is a security engineer at Gemini, and one of the minds behind the Gemini Dollar, the first regulated stablecoin. In this conversation, Arvanaghi and Anthony Pompliano discuss
- What a regulated stablecoin is
- How the Gemini Dollar works
- Why the naysayers misunderstand what Gemini is doing
- How stablecoins will play into use cases around the world
What are you most excited about going into 2019
I’m excited for another year of adoption. We had the booming year, we had the recalibrating year, and now we have a year where nobody knows what to expect.
2019 will be fun to watch for a few reasons. We’re seeing more interest from regulators globally in the cryptocurrency space. That will almost certainly influence where crypto projects allocate their capital, both human and financial. How the landscape shifts — and it will — is something I’m eager to watch.
Second, this is the year companies get more serious about their bottom lines. What does our space look like when the projects in it are focused on sustainable growth?
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
I realized just how much blockchains embody governance models. If a blockchain fails today, you can almost certainly find the same reasons for that failure in a history textbook.
The blockchains we’re seeing today will challenge, then reaffirm everything we thought we knew about governance. We’re seeing all these experimental governance models linger on because there hasn’t been any outside force to expose them. I think you can find the end state of cryptocurrencies — which will survive, which won’t — in a history textbook right now.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
It’s an unpopular and optimistic opinion. I don’t buy the “people don’t care about their privacy” and “people don’t care who has their data” angles. Pressure causes change, and there just hasn’t been any pressure for people to make cryptocurrencies part of their daily lives. Think about how long you — likely a consumer of cryptocurrencies — have had the “Updates are available on your computer. Install now or remind tomorrow?” button lingering on your computer. Even though you’d probably like the outcome!
We’ll see more pressure this year. That pressure will not be an Armageddeon scenario, nor does it ever need to be. It will come from thought leaders and influencers making the first push, which will be just enough to get people to incur the cost of learning what cryptocurrencies are all about. We’ve already seen some high profile individuals leaving Patreon in 2019 in favor of cryptocurrencies.
Michael Oved: Building Airswap and Fluidity
Published October 26th, 2018
Michael Oved is the founder of Airswap and Fluidity. In this conversation, Oved and Anthony Pompliano discuss
- Decentralized exchanges
- Tokenized securities
- What he’s up to with Airswap and Fluidity
What are you most excited about going into 2019
The continuous integration of decentralized finance apps on Ethereum, this time with programmable debt and security tokens.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
Wall Street has very little interest in cryptocurrencies, but significant interest in security tokens.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
MakerDAO is more interesting than Bitcoin.
Bill Barhydt: Ex-CIA and Goldman Sachs Entrepreneur on What’s Next for Bitcoin
Published November 12th, 2018
Bill Barhydt is the founder of Abra, a simple to use crypto-currency investment platform backed by some of the best investors in the world. In this conversation, Barhydt and Anthony Pompliano discuss
- Working at the CIA
- Financial services regulation
- Building on Bitcoin
- Where Bill thinks the crypto-currency industry is headed
What are you most excited about going into 2019
I’m most excited about the potential for bitcoin to grow usage dramatically in 2019. We believe bitcoin will become the basis for an entirely new type of investing and banking model whereby consumers utilize synthetic assets based on bitcoin to get investment exposure to any traditional asset. This model is the basis for Abra’s own synthetic asset model which is quickly gaining in popularity amongst our user base. I expect trillions of dollars in synthetic assets based on bitcoin to be created over the next ten years which will drive bitcoin demand to incredible new highs. This phenomenon of creating synthetic assets based on bitcoin will really kick in to overdrive in 2019.
What is the biggest thing you learned in 2018
There is way too much emphasis on the price of bitcoin versus the utility of bitcoin. Creating new “hard money” from scratch is incredibly complex but it’s working. People who are in bitcoin for a quick buck are going to be disappointed. People who hold bitcoin for the future (less than 10% of their net worth) have a greater than 25% chance, in my opinion, of seeing a huge return over the mid term — greater than 5 years.
What is your most unpopular opinion going into 2019
Bitcoin still needs significantly increased on-chain scaling to reach its potential. Lightning is working which is fantastic but there is no reason not to increase the bitcoin block size to 4mb which I believe would dramatically increase the usage and utility of bitcoin without sacrificing network security. Even as a settlement layer for Lightning bitcoin will need more on-chain scaling. The sooner we address this head on, not just via technical trickery but via a real block increase, the sooner the public will realize that bitcoin is serious about becoming both a hard money settlement system (on-chain) and a viable payment system via Lightning (off-chain.)
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