Yahoo! Finance recently had an interview with Jed McCaleb, the co-founder, and CTO of the Stellar payment network. The interview was taken on New Year’s Eve.
In the interview, he stated that majority of the financial institutions would not be using Bitcoin (BTC) payment network.
McCaleb is also the founding father of the now obsolete Japanese Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. He is also the co-founder of Ripple. He mentioned that a permissionless, open blockchain in finance, is very important for the success of it. He wasn’t hesitant to tell the reporters directly that “It doesn’t need to be the bitcoin blockchain, but if it’s not a public chain, then you’re missing the point.”
McCaleb was with Ripple, who, due to some personal differences with the mission of Ripple’s corporate board left Ripple and launched Stellar. He believes that the overall outlook for the crypto market is “way-way up,” in spite of the bad phase it had to go through in the year 2018.
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McCaleb mentioned that its “wild to watch” the way in which money is invested in crypto projects. On the drop in the prices, he mentioned that with a fall in market capitalization and the base prices, other things start coming to track. He said that “One of the nice things that come with the market calming down—I still say it’s not a bear market—it means there’s less of that.”
McCaleb also criticized the cryptocurrency projects other than Bitcoin, Ethereum or his own Stellar. He said that “Ninety percent of these projects are B.S. I’m looking forward to that changing.” Later when asked about his opinion on the future of the cryptocurrency industry in the coming year he said, “Things like Tron, it’s just garbage. But people dump tons of money into it, these things that do not technically work.”
McCaleb thinks that there is no single cryptocurrency network or associated token which provide a solution to all the problems, let it be his own Stellar or its in-house coin, Lumens (XLM). He said that “There are some things bitcoin is good at, some things Ethereum is good at, and some things Stellar is good at. And none of them can do all the things well. That’s just not how the software works.”
Crypto projects are off late concentrating on publicizing their products. Last year, TRON, which is considered as an alternative token development platform to Ethereum, had increased its publicity efforts, including that of CEO Justin Sun regularly attacking the Ethereum network during any inadequacies.
When asked about people’s knowledge on what Stellar is, McCaleb accepted that he doesn’t think people know much about it. He added that “I don’t think they do. We’ve done a pretty poor job of marketing it and telling the world what Stellar is about. I think they have a vague notion that it’s for payments, but I don’t think they know the details and the real power of it. We’re hoping to change that in 2019, but it’s a process.”
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In December, Stellar had associated with cryptocurrency wallet provider Blockchain.com in order to expand the circulation and uptake of XLM with a massive $125 million airdrop to users.
