Coin Shares Chief Strategy Officer Meltem Demirors has been called out for allegedly contributing to bubble conditions in crypto markets by denying that there was a price bubble, advocating for more investments and ignoring advice to the contrary. In a scathing post published on Medium, Demirors was accused of being a consistent purveyor of “ignorant hype” prior to the end of the crypto market bull run of 2017 as well as presently.
Background to the Critique
The highly experienced 43 year-old business leader is currently the Chief Strategy Officer and Head of CS Treasury at CoinShares and founder of Athena Capital, an independent investment advisor and wealth management firm for high-net-worth individuals and families and institutional investors.
In a CNBC interview in December, 2017 Economist Robert Shiller identified what he thinks to be a bitcoin price bubble and advised caution, suggesting that it would be acceptable to ‘play’ with crypto without putting all of one’s portfolio into it.
In the same interview however, Demirors opined that what was happening was not a bubble but a genuine market movement driven by fundamentals, which would make it a prime investment subject.
In her words:
We are just getting started and this financial speculation is fueling the development of infrastructure.
When the bubble burst a few weeks later, in another CNBC interview, she spun the market crash as good news for investors, and suggested that institutional and retail investors should ignore the price and think of cryptocurrency in similar terms to an early internet stock, such as Amazon, Intel or Microsoft in the days following the dotcom crash of the early noughties.
CryptoWhistle Goes After Demirors
In the article, CryptoWhistle emphasises that Demirors refuses to acknowledge that she proferred unprofitable advice to the many who may have incurred losses as a result of accepting her counsel as a crypto advocate.
According to Crypto Whistle, not only does she need to take responsibility for her calls and do her due diligence by independently verifying her points, she also owes the world an apology.
The article specifically singles out Meltem’s December 2017 claim that the building crypto bubble was not really a bubble.
An excerpt from the article reads:
…In December 2017, she audaciously denied that there was a BTC price bubble (saying, this time is different because “we are just getting started”) and urged us all to buy at $17,000, saying it wasn’t “too late”. Meltem did so in front of the legendary Yale Economist and Nobel Laureate Robert Schiller. Its one thing to be a crypto rebel, but quite another to cavalierly dismiss the warnings of Robert Schiller. Nothing is sacred anymore.
