On Tuesday (16 October 2018), Joey Krug, co-founder of Beam and Augur, and co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital Management, had an interview with Bloomberg TV, during which he said that he expected the next bull run to have a 10x effect on the prices in the crypto space.
Pantera Capital, founded by Dan Morehead in 2013, is one of the leading blockchain investment firms and one of the largest institutional owners of cryptocurrencies. Its portfolio includes 0x Protocol, Abra, Augur, Bitcoin, Circle, Civic, Enigma, Ethereum, Icon, XRP, and Zcash.
Here are the main highlights from Krug’s interview:
We’ve seen significant sell-off in the main cryptoassets… Are we at a bottom now?
“Yeah, I think we are close to a bottom at this point. I think the market is essentially range-bound, waiting for some catalysts to pick things back up.”
Catalysts being …?
“I think it’s basically two things right now in cryptocurrencies. All these decentralized applications have launched, but they basically have no users yet, and there’s two things holding them back.
One is that these networks aren’t scalable. So, it’s essentially like the internet before dial-up is how fast these networks are. So, very slow. And it’s also really expensive to get fiat into cryptocurrency today. I think that’s going to change a lot over the next six to nine months.”
So, are you looking at startups that are solving the scalability issue?
“We’ve invested in a lot of projects that are trying to solve that problem. It’s basically a computer science problem.”
When do you get the Bitcoin blockchain being as fast as Visa or Mastercard?
“I don’t know if that will ever happen for Bitcoin, but I do think we’ll see blockchains as fast as Visa or Mastercard within the next couple of years.”
What about the cost of changing fiat into cryptoassets?
“Right now, if you use Coinbase, that’s around 150 to 400 basis points if you use a debit card or ACH for a bank account, and I think within the next year, that’ll be down to 50 basis points. Maybe not Coinbase, maybe some upstart, but I think… all these new exchanges popping up are going to drive costs down.”
Why wasn’t [the news about] Fidelity more of a catalyst to the market yesterday?
“Two years ago, that would have been a huge bull run… But I think at this point the market is really waiting for actual adoption to start to pick up.”
When does that happen?
“To get that, you need scalability… If you don’t have scalability, you don’t have market makers, and so you don’t have liquidity.”
What price point do you see on Bitcoin if we solve the scalability issue and get a bull run?
“I think that if you look at that next bull run, I think the crypto space overall could 10x from here.”
Featured Image Courtesy of Pantera Capital
