FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried discussed why he thinkssolana is superior toethereum in a recent interview.- He talked about how institutional investors may still be years away from widely adopting
crypto . - And he talked about what steps his company takes to make sure newcomers to crypto don't think FTX is a scam.
Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who heads up the FTX exchange, recently discussed the current cryptocurrency climate, including the outlook for institutional investment, the rise of non-fungible tokens and how a badly placed ad can make rookies question the legitimacy of a crypto exchange.
29-year old Bankman-Fried took part in Yahoo Finance and Decrypts's "Crypto Goes Mainstream" virtual conference on Tuesday.
Here are Bankman-Fried's best quotes, lightly edited and condensed for clarity:
- "Solana is one of the few currently existing public blockchains that has a really plausible roadmap to scale millions of transactions per second at fractions of a penny per transaction, which is a scale that you need for this." - on discussing rivals to the ethereum network.
- "Actual institutional adoption inflows themselves have not driven very much - the anticipation of them have. But the inflows themselves have not yet materialized. You talk to most major institutions, they will tell you they're getting into crypto and they will tell you that it is not happening tomorrow." - on the flows driving the rise of cryptocurrencies.
- "It's gonna take you know, a year for many of these places, sometimes multiple years, the amount of work that a compliance department has to do to get acquainted with the cryptocurrency ecosystem to become comfortable with it is fairly significant. '' - on institutional adoption of crypto.
- "I think that (is the) sort of timeframe that we imagine transformation happening on, you know, both in terms of what technology can accomplish, the adoption you can get and the institutional support it can get, I think every year, those time frames shorten a little bit. And we see things turning over faster and faster and getting adopted faster."
- "There is some excitement from newcomers and there's a huge amount of excitement from partners to build out new products involving non-fungible tokens, which I think could be really exciting."
- "NFTs have had an absolute explosion in usage over the last six months, but it is still predominantly driven in most places by the crypto industry rather than by newcomers."
- "I think one thing to note is that I'm not super liquid as far as these things go. You can sort of look at - mark to market - valuations and things like that, but all my worth is just wrapped up in like the equity valuations - like FTX's valuation, which means my bank account is certainly under a million." - on how much he keeps in his bank account.
- "I have probably given $30 million or so this year. Some of that has been talked about more than others." - on his charitable donations.
- "We certainly don't have 100 million users and what this means is that when someone is looking to get involved in the crypto ecosystem for the first time, especially if it's monthly, there's a good chance they haven't even heard of us yet."
- "Crypto companies you've never heard of run ads on Google or Facebook. It's not very compelling. You probably assume it's basically just a scam." - on why FTX doesn't place ads on big platforms.
- "The biggest mistake I made, which is only sort of an answer to the question, is not getting involved sooner."