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Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Wednesday that 90% of NFTs would eventually be worthless and that people shouldn’t dismiss dogecoin.
Ehrsam also described decentralized finance as the “bleeding edge” of the blockchain world and said there was a danger that the US would get bitcoin regulation wrong. He added that Elon Musk and Bill Gates should reconsider their criticisms of bitcoin’s energy use.
Ehrsam left Coinbase, the crypto exchange that went public this spring with a $100 billion valuation, in 2017. He also cofounded the blockchain investment firm Paradigm.
Here are the eight best quotes from Ehrsam’s interview with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Studio 1.0“:
- “People are going to try all sorts of things. There’ll be millions and millions of cryptocurrencies and crypto assets, just like there were millions and millions of websites. Most of them won’t work.” – on the huge number of crypto projects.
- “I go so far as to say that 90% of NFTs produced, they probably will have little to no value in three to five years. You could say the same thing about early internet companies in the late ’90s too, though.” – on nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.
- “If crypto has taught us anything, it’s never to dismiss a good meme that couldn’t later manifest into more concrete progress.” – on dogecoin and crypto communities.
- “The thing that really changed in 2017 is all of a sudden the doors opened to much broader applications. Ethereum came on the scene and showed that blockchain-based applications were possible to build … I think over time we’ll see mainstream consumer apps, and perhaps NFTs are a weird bleeding edge of exactly that.” – on decentralized finance.
- “Crypto is a nuanced issue, and that it’s possible the US gets crypto wrong. Today you have a lot of regulators whose job it is to mitigate risk and keep us all safe, and that’s very appropriate. At the same time, I think crypto is the next internet-sized opportunity for the United States.” – on regulation.
- “I think they should examine the issue more closely … My personal view is it’s actually going to be a lot more energy-efficient to use these digital systems of value transfer over time. But it’s understandable that there’s a lot of confusion early.” – on Elon Musk’s and Bill Gates’ criticisms of bitcoin’s environmental impact.
- “The world doesn’t change overnight, but you can see the seeds of exponential growth occurring already. So I do think we will live in a future where for us to coordinate, we won’t need these centralized platforms today. That’s already true of financial services, in that you can be your own bank. You don’t need a central institution to hold your money anymore.” – on the potential of crypto technology.
- “History is yet to be written. My view is that it’s a very strong place to be, to have the largest mainstream brand trust not only with users but also with regulators, and that being that bridge into the crypto world is a great place to start.” – on Coinbase possibly declining like AOL.