Last month, the Chief Executive Officer of Ark Invest, Cathie Wood, caused a stir by reiterating her bullish stance on Bitcoin. She forecast with absolute certainty that the value of the cryptocurrency would reach $1 million by the year 2030, reiterating a prediction that her company made back in April. At the time of her prediction, the value of the cryptocurrency was below $17,000.
This past weekend, she shared data to back up her continued confidence in Bitcoin and signalled that she will not waver in her support for the cryptocurrency. At the same time, she criticised Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
The sudden failure of FTX in the previous month shook investors’ faith in an industry that was already reeling from the effects of a “crypto winter.”
On Saturday, Wood stated in a tweet that “The Bitcoin blockchain didn’t skip a beat during the crisis that was caused by opaque centralised players.” It’s easy to see why Sam Bankman Fried didn’t care for Bitcoin given that it’s open source and decentralised. He was helpless in the face of it.
Wood also provided a link to a report on Bitcoin that her company had produced, which stated as follows: “Despite market volatility associated with FTX’s demise, the supply held by long-term holders—or the supply that was last moved 155 days ago or more—closed flat for the month of November.” Despite the recent events, we believe that this datapoint indicates holders’ high conviction and long-term focus on the investment. 72% of the total supply of bitcoin that is currently in circulation is held by long-term holders.
The perspective of a Bitcoin maximalist on FTX
One of these long-term Bitcoin holders is MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, who refers to himself as a Bitcoin maximalist. Saylor has held Bitcoin for a long time. This week, he also provided his thoughts on the FTX debacle.
As he explained it this week on the PBD Podcast, “You have the Bitcoin community opposite the crypto community, and there’s been a low-grade, sort of boiling guerrilla war between the two camps for the past two and a half years.” “And Sam is sort of like the poster child for the crypto world,” the speaker continued.
It was always the case, according to him, that Bankman-Fried and others like him were guilty of “shitcoinery” or of “pumping and promoting unregistered securities…
If you have the thought process of “I am front-running my customers, issuing a token, manipulating the price of the token, and dumping it on them,” then you are acting unethically.
Last month, when speaking to Bloomberg about the collapse of FTX, Wood said that Bitcoin “is coming out of this smelling like a rose,” while also giving a nod to Ether, the cryptocurrency that has the second-largest market cap.
“Indeed, a great number of people have dropped a significant amount of cash. The value of the ecosystem for crypto assets is decreasing as a result of this. However, if our assessment of the fundamental technology and the fundamental roles that Bitcoin and Ether, as well as Ethereum, are going to play in this new world is accurate, then I believe that we will make a good recovery in a relatively short amount of time.”
A month ago, Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, stated that the failure of FTX offered some instructive lessons.
According to what he told Bloomberg, “What happened at FTX was of course a huge tragedy.” However, many people in the Ethereum community also see the situation as confirmation of things they have always believed, such as the notion that anything centralised is automatically suspicious. Among these beliefs is also the notion that one should put more faith in “open and transparent code” rather than in individual people.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and Charlie Munger, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, both remain sceptical of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, with Munger describing them as “partly fraud and partly delusion” just one month ago. Other prominent business leaders also continue to be sceptical of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Mark Mobius, who is a billionaire and the co-founder of Mobius Capital Partners, made a prediction not too long ago that Bitcoin’s price will drop to $10,000 the following year. In May, he correctly predicted that Bitcoin’s price would drop to $20,000; more recently, his prediction was accurate.
In an effort to obtain comment, Fortune reached out to Bankman-Fried; however, the company did not immediately respond.
Yahoofinance.com was cited as the source.
