Head of Research at BitWise: Most Cryptos “Will Die”

Matt Hougan, the head of research at BitWise, has declared that the crypto bubble will burst soon and that 95 percent of cryptos will die, in a February 5, 2019 interview with Bloomberg.

Bubble Burst

While most people outside the cryptoverse are most familiar with giants like bitcoin and Ethereum, there are still thousands of other cryptocurrencies. The last decade has seen an explosion of new cryptos such as platform cryptos and even celebrity cryptos. However, Matt Hougan, global head of research at Bitwise Asset Management, believes that this is merely a phase and stated:

“95 percent of these will die a painful and deserved death.”

This isn’t a bad thing however, as Hougan has said that similar to the dot-com bubble, the crypto bubble will leave the truest viable entities surviving and the market will have a chance to mature.

Hougan explains:

“From those ashes, if you call them ashes, I mean cryptos up 300 percent over the last two years, so that’s ashes. They’re nice ashes. But from those ashes, I think will merge important things. Just like from the dotcom ashes emerged Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc,”

Just a Phase?

Like any emerging industry, crypto has a lot of people entering and exiting at a rapid pace, and it is estimated that new currencies are created and folded up every week.

A reason for this is because many still see cryptocurrency as a get-rich-quick scheme and either create currencies that are virtually unknown or engage in pump-and-dump schemes. Like Hougan has pointed out, the industry will likely see a burst in which the less viable cryptocurrencies will die off and only the stronger ones will survive.

This was the case in the dot-com bubble era and it seems History is bound to repeat itself.

A similar option was given on ICOs, where Hougan stated that too many of them were not genuine.

“People are going to jail and I think they should.” he said, “ …but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate things.”

This mirrors statements made by the SEC in 2018 when they announced that they had been forced to shut down several ICOs for failure to register or being outright scams.

Hougan also expressed optimism at BitEise gaining approval for an ETF, which they filed for in January and is awaiting SEC approval, stating that an ETF could bring a lot of positive attention to the industry.