Cathie Wood: SBF disliked Bitcoin because he ‘couldn’t control it’
Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood made waves last month by maintaining her bullish stance on Bitcoin. Despite the cryptocurrency having fallen more than 60% in the year to below $17,000 at the time, she confidently predicted it would reach $1 million by 2030, echoing a call by her firm in April.
This weekend she signaled her continued confidence in Bitcoin and shared data to back it up, while criticizing Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
FTX collapsed abruptly last month, shaking confidence in a sector already reeling from a “crypto winter.”
On Saturday, Wood tweeted“The Bitcoin blockchain didn’t skip a beat during the crisis caused by opaque centralized actors. No wonder Sam Bankman Fried didn’t like Bitcoin: it’s transparent and decentralized. He couldn’t control it.”
Wood also shared a link to a Bitcoin report from her firm, which said:
“Despite market volatility associated with FTX’s demise, supply held by long-term holders – or supply last moved 155 days ago or more – closed for the month of November. We believe this data point indicates holders’ long-term focus and high conviction, despite recent events. Today, long-term holder supply is 72% of bitcoin’s total circulating supply.”
A Bitcoin Maximalist’s View of FTX
One of these long-term Bitcoin holders is MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, who describes himself as a Bitcoin maximalist. He also weighed in on the FTX fiasco this week.
“You have the Bitcoin community versus the crypto community, and it’s been a low-grade, kind of simmering guerrilla war between the two camps for the last two and a half years,” he said this week on PBD Podcast. “And Sam is kind of like the poster child of the crypto world.”
Bankman-Fried and his ilk were always guilty of “shitcoinery,” he said, or of “pumping and promoting unregistered securities … It’s unethical if you think, ‘I’m going ahead of my clients, issuing a token, manipulating the price of token, and dump it on them.'”
Wood, speaking about the FTX collapse, told Bloomberg last month that Bitcoin is “coming out of this smelling like a rose,” while also giving a nod to Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
“Yes, a lot of people have lost a lot of money. The crypto asset ecosystem is losing value here. But if we get the underlying technology right and the underlying roles that Bitcoin and Ether, Ethereum, are going to play in this new world, I think we going to get us pretty quick.”
Last month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the collapse of FTX contained valuable lessons.
“What happened at FTX was, of course, a great tragedy,” he told Bloomberg. “That said, many in the Ethereum community also see the situation as confirmation of things they’ve believed all along: Centralized everything is suspect by default.” These beliefs also include trusting “open and transparent code over individual people.”
Many prominent business executives remain skeptical of both Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, of course, among them JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger, who last month called them “part fraud and part delusion.” Mark Mobius, the billionaire co-founder of Mobius Capital Partners, recently predicted that Bitcoin will fall to $10,000 next year – in May, he correctly predicted the cryptocurrency’s fall to $20,000.
Fortune contacted Bankman-Fried for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.
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