Jed McCaleb: 90% of existing cryptocurrency projects – complete crap

Co-founder of the protocol Stellar and CTO of Interstellar, Jed McCaleb, believes that most financial institutions will not use Bitcoin, but still supports open and public blockchains. He said this in an interview with Yahoo Finance .

Last September, Lightyear Corp., a former commercial division of the Stellar Development Foundation, acquired developer blockchain solutions for the financial industry Chain, announcing its intention to transfer the startup products to the public blockchain Stellar. Brands Lightyear Corp. and Chain were then abolished, and the Interstellar project appeared instead.

Jed McCaleb

Responding to a question about how the integration takes place and how it fits into the “blockchain, but not Bitcoin” rhetoric common on Wall Street, McCaleb said:

“One of the main motivations [when buying] Chain was that all these private chains with access rights have certain limitations […] I agree that most financial institutions will not use bitcoin. But the blockchain gives you public records that everyone can see, but no one can change. The parties may carry out transactions without knowing each other. Therefore, public networks are needed. It doesn't have to be a bitcoin blockchain, but if it's not a public chain, you miss the main point. ”

He also drew attention to the fact that often the term “blockchain” turns out to be very blurred and everything mixes together.

“But there are different protocols, and all of them are designed for different scenarios. There are things where Bitcoin is good to use, Ethereum will be better somewhere, and Stellar will be better somewhere. None of these protocols can do everything equally well — software doesn't work that way, ” said McCaleb.

According to him, Stellar, for example, is best suited for international payments and tokenization of values of any type. Therefore, it can be called a universal payment network. At the same time, as McCaleb says, while the steylcoin and the desire to tokenize everything around are now becoming popular, Stellar always gave this opportunity, just the process itself was called differently.

In the past, the founder of the exchange Mt. Gox and one of the founders of the Ripple protocol, Jed McCaleb also said that although everyone says that 2018 was the year of the fall of cryptocurrency, he himself believes that in reality the market continues to grow.

“It's funny when they say that cryptocurrencies have fallen. They grow. Yes, prices have fallen from peak levels, but in general, everything is growing. We are not so much focused on prices, so for us it does not play a special role. Of course, when prices rise, this is an indicator of more interest, and people have more money to do something, ”he said.

Reflecting on how the cryptocurrency industry has transformed over the past 10 years, Jed McCaleb believes that it has exceeded initial expectations or at least grew at a faster rate. Nevertheless, he also admits that there is a lot of hype around.

“It's awesome to see how capital and resources are allocated for millions of dollars when these projects have no technical foundation. It is very sad. I hope the situation will begin to change. And a good thing in a calmer one — I don’t call it a bear market — the market is that it will be less of everything, ”he says.

Moreover, as McCaleb is convinced, 90% of existing projects are “complete crap.”

“Projects like Tron, well, it just sucks. But people invest huge amounts of money there, although technically all this does not work. In many cases, you just need a digital payment system, and then you can use Stellar or Bitcoin. The same cannabis industry does not need a separate payment system at all, ” he concluded.

Recall that at the end of last year, the developers of the Kik messenger announced that they were refusing the Ethereum blockchain in favor of Stellar.

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