Daniel Masters, JPMorgan alumni who’s now the CEO of digital investment bank , is a longtime bull who predicts the cryptocurrency market will soar to new heights.
‘Trench Warfare’ Between Big Banks and Crypto Upstarts
Masters Bloomberg that even if only five percent of the “total financial ecosystem accrues to cryptocurrencies [that] market will still be much bigger than it is today.”
The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies currently hovers at about $399 billion, according to . But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to where the market is going, Masters predicts.
While sham initial coin offerings () such as the debacle have generated headlines, Masters said the negative image of crypto is overblown because of the media attention the bad apples get. He pointed out that fewer than three percent of small ICOs make it through a “multi-stage screening process” that would weed out potential scams.
Masters, who’s also the chief investment officer at Global Advisors, previously ran JPMorgan’s New York energy trading operations in the 1990s before launching his own commodities fund. He began investing in bitcoin in 2014 — when prices hovered between $325 and $800 — and he has never looked back.
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Masters previously said that big investment banks like JPMorgan initially dismissed the cryptocurrency industry because there’s an unspoken “trench warfare” going on between traditional financial services and digital newcomers.
“There’s something of a trench warfare going on between what I call analogue financial services companies and digital financial services companies,” Masters Business Insider in February 2018.
“The analogue financial services companies are not in this game at all. They don’t want to touch the core currency, which is bitcoin or ethereum. They’re suspicious about the industry itself. A lot of people think it’s a criminal enterprise and a Ponzi scheme and a scam.”
‘Banks Have Failed to Innovate’
Daniel Masters said the major investment banks’ collective resistance to crypto is steeped in fear that the nascent industry will render traditional banking obsolete.
“Banks have sat on their laurels for 30 years. I just threw out my checkbook. It looks exactly the same as it did in 1985. [Banks] have absolutely failed to innovate in any way, shape, or form and now they’re paying the price.”
Masters said traditional finance has become so mired in regulations that “nobody enjoys working in it anymore.” In contrast, the decentralized, mostly unregulated crypto ecosystem is fresh, exciting, and innovative.
Despite the initial skepticism that traditional banks had toward cryptocurrencies, digital assets are slowly gaining traction. The Cboe and CME both recently introduced bitcoin futures contracts and Goldman Sachs is also reportedly launching a bitcoin trading desk.
Ditching Wall Street for Crypto Startups
Similarly, there’s a surging trend of investment banking veterans who are ditching traditional finance jobs on Wall Street to crypto startups, as BTCManager has reported.
Many top business schools such as Wharton and have also expanded their course offerings to include bitcoin, blockchain, and the cryptocurrency market amid ballooning demand from recruiters, especially those in venture capital.
“We’re at the point where there’s a critical mass to teach this domain,” Wharton professor Kevin Werbach CNBC.
“There will be a real phenomenon in business for the foreseeable future. And five years down the road, there won’t be too many major business schools that don’t offer similar classes.”
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TRON has announced that it will be carrying out a 30 million TRX airdrop to the Ethereum community via a on the project’s Medium account on April 21, 2018. According to the announcement, the airdrop is a show of gratitude towards the Ethereum community for its support throughout the .
TRON is a decentralized blockchain network just like Ethereum that plans to support the development of numerous decentralized applications (DApps). TRX is the native currency of the TRON project.
Details of the Airdrop
The TRON airdrop is for Ethereum holders who have a balance of at least 1ETH on April 20, 2018, at midnight (UTC) which corresponds to block 5471198 and users on the Ethereum blockchain who send or receive ETH between midnight of January 1, 2018, and midnight of April 20, 2018. TRON plans to collate the data over the course of a week after which the airdrop token distribution will commence.
The 30 million TRX tokens earmarked for the airdrop are currently valued at approximately $1.7 million. Each chosen account will receive a random TRX amount between 10 and 100 TRX. Ethereum users do not have to undertake any activity to be part of the airdrop as the TRON team will handle all the logistics. TRON has also stated that it will not solicit wallet addresses from anyone and that users should report any suspicious activity related to the proposed airdrop.
No Longer an ERC20 Token
The launch of the signified that the project would no longer be hosted on the Ethereum network which meant that it was leaving the ERC20 platform to develop their mainnet architecture. The mainnet is expected to be fully developed before the end of May 2018. TRON was part of an ensemble cast of projects on the Ethereum Network which include EOS, ICON, and VeChain just to mention a few.
Critical of the Ethereum Network
While TRON is gifting Ethereum holders with TRX tokens, the project remains critical of the network. Despite acknowledging the role played by Ethereum during the formative period of the project, the TRON team asserted that many issues and bottlenecks are plaguing network. As a result, the project wants to move their legacy platform where it can deliver premium decentralized network service solutions.
Competing with Ethereum
Speaking during the of the TRON testnet, Justin Sun, the founder of TRON said that the project was going to be a direct competitor of Ethereum. Justin Sun further went on to say that:
“We will compete face to face with Ethereum, and we have confidence we will build a large ecosystem; a much large ecosystem than the Ethereum. I will explain to you why we can surpass Ethereum in the future.”
There are already the makings of a rivalry brewing between TRON and Ethereum as Vitalik Buterin; the Ethereum co-founder alluded to some projects as having “.”
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