“Bitcoin will be replaced by Ethereum token”, Kenneth Griffin
Billionaire CEO of America’s hedge fund Citadel, Kenneth Griffin, has recently stated that he thinks a currency on the Ethereum network would very soon replace Bitcoin as crypto’s top notch.
Citadel presently manages over $40 billion of capital which is a quarter of the total trading volume in the United States stock market.
During the November 10 DealBook summit organized by The New York Times, Ken Griffin said he had expressed that he is anticipating that the Bitcoin-based conception would be soon replaced by the Ethereum-based conception “in the next generation of cryptocurrencies.”
Griffin also added that Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies have the benefits of “higher transaction speeds [and] lower cost per transaction.”
Ethereum is slightly faster than Bitcoin currently, but it would soon significantly scale up transaction speeds and lower the costs considerably when Ethereum 2.0 has been fully implemented.
Griffin has been a long-time crypto sceptic, especially of Bitcoin. He has also claimed that there are “no commercial use cases for.”
He has noted that cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain technology have proven to be a “really interesting technology” as well as “a powerful way” for maintaining a decentralized ledger around the world. However, he added that for most problems, “it’s really not the solution that we need.”
People are usually “very focused” in a world brimming with new ideas and new creation, which he said makes him worry that some of the outpouring “passion is misplaced when it comes to cryptocurrencies.”
During the summit, he had also claimed that there are a great number of issues that “haven’t been addressed by crypto,” which includes the risk of fraudulent activities, energy expenditure and high costs.
Bitcoin, he thinks, is “incredibly expensive to manage payments on.” Presently, it costs approximately $4.1 per Bitcoin transaction whereas typical credit card transaction fees range between 1.4 per cent and 3.5 per cent on popular networks such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express. The recommended surcharge cost on debit cards is around 0.5 per cent.
Where sustainability is concerned, Griffin has claimed that Bitcoin is “a bigger contributor to global warming” than any other form of payment that is in use around the world today in totality.
Bitcoin’s annual carbon footprint amounts to 90.48 tonnes of CO2. Each Bitcoin transaction’s carbon footprint equals to 2,008,657 Visa transactions approximately, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index.
Bitcoin mining, however, Griffin explained, utilizes the lowest cost forms of energy like renewable energy and surplus power that would otherwise have been wasted. It is also more difficult to actually quantify the total amount of emissions that banks and financial institutions are responsible for.
When asked if he has missed the crypto train, Grffin said that he opined that “the train is still in the station”, and it is very much early to think towards it.
Earlier in 2021, there had been rumours that Citadel was behind the trading limits placed on Robinhood for GameStop shares. He had then denied any personal involvement in the episode during the summit, calling it a “bad comedy joke.”
