President of ETF.com and Bitwise Researcher Says: “95% of Cryptos Are Useless and Will Die a Painful Death”

Matt Hougan, President of ETF.com and Global Head of Research at Bitwise Asset Management, recently did an interview with Bloomberg where he expressed his thoughts that the majority of cryptocurrencies will die.

Hougan was quoted as saying:

“There are 2,000 cryptocurrencies out there, 95 percent of them are useless and will die a painful death. The sooner that happens, the better.”

According to Hougan, there are a lot of bad crypto projects in the industry that are currently being cleared up. As previously reported by IIB, approximately 1,000 crypto projects have already died in 2018, and as Hougan puts it, there are a lot more to go before the market reaches equilibrium.

Bad Crypto Projects Must Die to Leave Room for Winners

Though Hougan has a negative outlook on the majority of cryptocurrencies, he expects good crypto projects to rise from the ashes, just as from the bursting of the dotcom bubble emerged great companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others.

Moreover, Hougan pointed out that he’s far more bullish on crypto assets than on blockchain, using the internet’s nascency to compare the current state of the industry with private blockchains and public blockchains.

“If you remember the early days of the internet […] everyone was really excited about corporate intranets. […] People thought corporate intranets were the thing. The analogy between an open internet which people are like no one will trust that…”

Hougan believes that public blockchains that are open and accessible to anyone need a crypto asset to function, and that ultimately public, open, and accessible technologies tend to win.

However, he did acknowledge that private blockchains will have their role to play in the future, due to their ability to permit faster and cheaper transactions as well as efficient data management. He used the management of mortgages as a scenario where private blockchains might thrive in the future.

However, he believes the real value lies in public blockchains that displace trusted third parties and middlemen:

“I think the massive improvement is this displacement a trusted middleman that public blockchains allow.”

Bitcoin ETFs and ICOs

Later in the interview, the conversation shifted to Bitcoin ETFs, index funds, and initial coin offerings (ICOs). Regarding ICOs, Hougan declared that a lot of them were scams. However, he did note that there are some legitimate ones.

As for Exchange traded funds (ETFs), in January 2019, Hougan’s firm Bitwise filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch a physically held Bitcoin (BTC) ETF.