Jed McCaleb Says Financial Institutions Are Not Going To Use Bitcoin

During 2018, analysts and enthusiasts in the crypto space have been waiting for financial institutions to enter the crypto market. Something that in the end did not happen. According to Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Ripple and Stellar Lumens (XLM), is not bullish about companies investing in Bitcoin.

Jed McCaleb had a conversation with Yahoo Finance in which he talked about Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the digital currency space. He started talking about Stellar’s acquisition of Chain. He said that he believes that most financial institutions are not going to use Bitcoin. Nevertheless, he thinks that institutions need public blockchain to operate and transact.

On the matter, he commented:

“I think it’s true that most financial institutions are not going to use bitcoin. But in my mind, what blockchain gives you is a public record that everyone can see, but they can’t change it. So parties can transact even if they don’t know each other. So you still need a public chain. It doesn’t need to be the bitcoin blockchain but if it’s not a public chain, then you’re missing the point.”

He has also emphasized that there are several chains in the network and that several of them have good and bad things. McCaleb believes that there is no perfect network and that none of them can do all the things well.

About Stellar, he said that this virtual currency and blockchain is good at cross-border payments and also tokenizing value. That means that Stellar could be used as a universal payment network.

He then talked about cryptocurrency prices. During 2018, Bitcoin (BTC) and most of the virtual currencies in the market experienced a hard drop. Some of them lost more than 95% of their value. McCaleb explained that they are not focused on price and that it does not matter to them too much.

He still believes that virtual currencies are still way up, even when they are down from the peak. However, if prices grow, it does not mean that more people are interested and that companies can do what they want.

Finally, he said that the space grew faster than what he and many others were initially expecting. At the same time, he said that he is surprised about how hype-driven the market currently is. The allocation of capital and resources has been very surprising. According to him, it is a big shame when projects with zero technical merits receive millions of dollars.

He has also criticized Stellar saying that they have done a ‘pretty poor job’ of marketing and telling the world how Stellar works. Apparently, they could change that in 2019.

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