On Wednesday (February 13th), Barry Silbert, the founder and CEO of incubator and crypto-focused venture capital firm Digital Currency Group (DCG) said in a phone interview with CNBC that he believed that most “digital tokens” would “go to zero”.
Former investment banker Silbert is one of the earliest and most active investors in the crypto space. DCG, the company he founded in 2015, says that it is “building and supporting the largest early stage investment portfolio in the digital currency and blockchain ecosystem,” backing 110 crypto-related businesses in 30 countries. Its portfolio includes some of the biggest names in the crypto space, including Abra, BitPay, BitPesa, Blockchain, Blockstream, Brave, Chainalysis, Circle, Coinbase, Kraken, Ledger, Ripple, and Xapo.
Silbert’s latest comments regarding cryptoassets came during a phone interview with CNBC:
“I'm not a believer in the vast majority of digital tokens and believe most will go to zero… Almost every ICO was just an attempt to raise money but there was no use for the underlying token. The vast majority of what's out there will be eliminated.”
Although Bitcoin (BTC) has fallen over 81% since reaching its all-time high in December 2017, Silbert, who started investing in Bitcoin in 2012, says he remains “as bullish as he has ever been” on Bitcoin, feeling confident that it has “won the race to be digital gold.” He believes that millennials do not share their parents’ faith in gold, and a lot of the gold they inherit will get converted to Bitcoin as a hedge:
“I'm convinced that whatever money is in gold is not going to stay in gold. That gets handed down to millennials — I'm highly confident a lot of that will go into bitcoin.”
He also thinks now that the infrastructure needed by institutional investors is being built, it is likely that more of them will consider investing in Bitcoin, and that if/when they do, the Bitcoin price will “snap back hard.”
On 18 July 2018, the DCG CEO said in an interview with CNBC’s “Fast Money” that DCG had invested money in only five cryptocurrencies, and that he thought 99% of cryptocurrencies would eventually go to zero:
“I am hoping that the movement of Wall Street into this asset class, which will bring a more fundamental valuation approach to this asset class… There's thousands of them out there. There's only five that we like. There's only five that we have money in. The other 99%, I think, are going to zero.”
So, what were these five cryptocurrencies that DCG likes so much?
“So, we have 50% in Bitcoin, 25% in Ethereum Classic, 15% in Zcash, 5% in Decentraland, and our newest one is 5% in ZenCash.
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