The Co-Founder of crypto currency exchange platform, Coinbase, Fred Ehrsam has stirred a hornet’s nest after he announced that 90 percent of the NFTs (non-fungible tokens) will be of no value in the coming three to five years.
His criticism of NFTs comes incidentally the same time the digital asset platform got a spiraled popularity all over the world.
The former Goldman Sachs foreign exchange trader drew a parallel between the early internet companies from late 1990s and NFTs and in a statement said:
“I go so far as to say that 90% of NFTs produced, they probably will have little to no value in three to five years.”
Many adjacent industries have been taken by storm recently. But it’s extremely volatile trading activities is making it too early to say how it’s going to play out. But according to one of the earliest purveyors, Fred Ehrsam, a vast majority of NFTs in the market today will be worthless in 3-5 years time.
Mr. Ehrsam had in a TV interview with Bloomberg, said that to him there was relatively not much difference between NFTs and other crypto projects born out of hype overnight.
“People are going to try all sorts of things. There’ll be millions and millions of crypto currencies and crypto assets, just like there were millions and millions of websites. Most of them won’t work,”
“The world doesn’t change overnight, but you can see the seeds of exponential growth occurring already,” he said in the Bloomberg interview. “I do think we will live in a future where for us to coordinate, we won’t need these centralized platforms today. That’s already true of financial services, in that you can be your own bank. You don’t need a central institution to hold your money anymore,” he said.
On digital currencies, he added that people should not dismiss the Shiba Inu dog-faced cryptocurrency Dogecoin — the digital currency that has soared the popularity of the crypto currency market to a whole different level.
“If crypto has taught us anything, it’s never to dismiss a good meme that couldn’t later manifest into more concrete progress,” the 33-years old Fred Ehrsam noted.
Even though serious concerns are being raised by Ehrsam, the NFT fever has taken the world by surprise, especially over the last year. Recently, the first non-fungible token (NFT) ever created — a pixilated digital figure known as a CryptoPunk — was sold at a Sotheby’s auction for a whopping $1.47 million. Last week, the SketchAR app made an announcement that it will now allow artists to upload, mint, and auction their creations as NFTs. Meanwhile, the app was already helping artists for the past four years. The app was missing the option to display artwork and monetize it in the global digital space as NFTs.
According to him:
“People are going to try all sorts of things. There’ll be millions and millions of crypto currencies and crypto assets, just like there were millions and millions of websites. Most of them won’t work,” Ehrsam explained.
Ehrsam started Bitcoin trading year 2010. He left investment bank to cofound the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase with Brian Armstrong in year 2012. Ehrsam parted ways with Armstrong in 2017 and launched Paradigm, a blockchain investment firm, in 2018.
Ehrsam believes that cryptocurrency is indeed “the next internet-sized opportunity for the United States.”
Ayoola Faseyi, an Abuja based Journalist with interest in Technology and Politics. He is a versatile writer with articles in many renowned News Journals. He is the Co-Founder of media brand, The Vent Republic.
