Ken Griffin: Bitcoin Won't Be Number One for Long

According to legendary investor Ken Griffin, bitcoin will soon be a thing of the past. The world’s number one digital currency by market cap will eventually be outdone by its main competitor Ethereum, which in turn, will be outdone by a whole new generation of digital currencies. He suggests that this will be a vicious cycle, in which many crypto assets likely will not survive and be replaced by future coins.

Ken Griffin Thinks ETH Will Outdo BTC

In an interview, Griffin states:

The early generation cryptocurrencies, bitcoin for example, are incredibly expensive to manage payments on. Bitcoin is a huge contributor to global warming. [It’s] bigger than any form of payments we use around the world in aggregate. Visa and Mastercard will be replaced by a crypto solution that will be a lower cost of making payments happen between businesses and consumers. I don’t fully buy that for a lot of reasons.

Griffin is the founder of Citadel, a hedge fund in Chicago. Currently, the company manages more than $40 billion in total assets. He says one of the big problems with the crypto industry as of late is that it will not face fraud or theft head-on the way credit card companies do, and thus digital assets aren’t likely to be taken seriously as payment methods due to this nonchalant attitude.

Griffin says:

I think we’re going to see bitcoin replaced conceptually by ‘the Ethereums.’ The train is still in the station.

By “Ethereums,” he’s referring to the many new coins – such as Solana – that have been built using Ethereum’s network. He’s confident Ethereum will one day become the primary cryptocurrency – only to be outdone by all the other assets that have been built on its blockchain.

Despite all this, Griffin admits that he didn’t buy bitcoin when he had the chance, and that he regrets not making a move early. He says:

There was a 21-year-old intern [that tried to tell me] the big picture I was missing with bitcoin. I wish I had bought the bitcoins he recommended I buy, but I didn’t. We talked about the power of blockchain, but we still don’t see many solid commercial use cases [for blockchain], [which] is a really interesting technology and a powerful way to maintain a decentralized ledger around the world, but for most problems, it’s really not the solution we need.

Will a Digital Dollar Come to Be?

Griffin also commented on the number of bank-issued cryptocurrencies that are now being issued:

I think we are all still trying to understand if we want to hit this world of decentralized finance and want a payment system that is low cost and effective. Is it going to be solved by the crypto community, or is it going to be solved by a digital dollar? The Chinese are all in on a digital renminbi. I think this is still in the early innings.

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