In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance on 31 December 2018, Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), commented that 90% of cryptocurrency projects are “B.S.” as the industry has grown so much solely due to the hype surrounding it.
He noted that it was unbelievable that projects with no technical merits were obtaining million of dollars of capital investments and resources. He specifically mentioned “things like TRON” to be projects that gained a lot of money from the public even though they technically would not end up working.
McCaleb did mention that he is looking forward to the shifting of the current crypto market to a more reliable theme. He did not see the current decline of the market prices as the sign of the market dying but rather a phase where the market is “calming down”. He elaborated that when the situation starts to settle down, people will start to realize that the existing cryptocurrencies such as Lumens (XLM), which is Stellar’s in-house coin, and Bitcoin (BTC), are more than enough.
However, he also believed that different cryptocurrencies have different advantages work better depending on the situation. He commented that none of the cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Bitcoin or Stellar could do well in everything and it was just how software work.
It is not news anymore that the year 2018 has been a bad year for the crypto world with cryptocurrencies facing 80-90% drops in their value. McCaleb, however, claimed in the interview that users should not be worried about the situation. He found it amusing that people were seeing the market as being dead while he himself believed that the market is still at the top.
Considering McCaleb’s history in the crypto world, his opinions do have some merit. He is considered to be a pioneer in the industry as he ventured into the world of crypto through Mt. Gox in 2007 when only Bitcoin existed. He later started working on Ripple protocol, which spawned XRP, one of the current biggest cryptocurrency.