IIB recently interviewed OKCoin CEO Tim Byun, who had a lot to say on the state of the market and the direction it was going in.
The recent bear market – “crypto winter” as it is popularly known – had hit the space quite hard, contributing to layoffs, a more judicious use of funds raised and a general pessimism about the prospects of growth. While most of the top coins remained healthy, a good swathe of the market was purged as a result of declining prices.
When asked about a purge in the crypto market, Byun said that it had already occurred, comparing the incident to the dotcom era and e-commerce startups,
I think the purge has occurred in 2018 and there will be more as the projects are like small businesses that have a high propensity to fail, though some or a few will do very well. Another good example of this occurred in the dotcom era with e-commerce startups.
Though Byun bears hope for the market, that hope is tempered with realism. He is bullish on the long-term prospects of Bitcoin (BTC), but says that the growth of the market as a whole is dependent on a lot of factors: technological development, working with regulators and improving services and usability for the average customers, saying,
OKCoin is bullish on the long-term price, but it’s dependent on a lot of progress being made by the entire ecosystem.
The OKCoin CEO’s views have been consistent with previous statements. In an earlier interview, he said that the market crash is reminiscent of the dotcom era, with a few successful companies emerging from it. A “revolutionary service”, he believes, could have a great impact,
My guess is that we’ll see a few good projects transition to mainnet and demonstrate clear use cases that could be revolutionary (think a service like Google Search) or novel (think a service like Facebook)… we have yet to see crypto ecosystems equivalent to Google nor Facebook, but it’s coming.
