Bitcoin Has No Future As Payments Network, Says FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire founder and CEO of crypto exchange FTX, believes that Bitcoin BTC/USD has no future as a payments network.

What Happened: In an interview with the Financial Times on Monday, Bankman-Fried said that more energy-efficient proof-of-stake blockchains would be required to evolve crypto as a transactional layer.

"The Bitcoin network is not a payments network and it is not a scaling network," he said.

See Also: PROOF OF STAKE VS PROOF OF WORK

Bitcoin runs on a Proof-of-Work consensus model, meaning that it requires a significant amount of computing power to verify cryptocurrency transactions. The amount of energy consumed when mining Bitcoin, and other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, has been a point of concern for a number of industry watchers.

Last year, Tesla Inc TSLA backtracked on its decision to accept BTC as payment, citing “environmental concerns” around the digital asset.

Bankman-Fried joins a growing list of critics that believe proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies are the best way forward for payments.

The FTX chief doesn’t believe that Bitcoin has no use cases as a cryptocurrency entirely. According to him, it could still have a future as "an asset, a commodity and a store of value."

"To be clear I also said that it does have potential as a store of value," the FTX CEO said in a tweet following the interview. "The BTC network can't sustain thousands/millions of TPS, although BTC can be [transferred] on lightning, [layer 2s,] etc."

Price Action: According to data from Benzinga Pro, Bitcoin was trading at $29,581, down 1.04% over 24 hours.

Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs
Comments
Loading...
Posted In: CryptocurrencyNewsMarketsBitcoinpaymentsSam Bankman-Fried
Benzinga simplifies the market for smarter investing

Trade confidently with insights and alerts from analyst ratings, free reports and breaking news that affects the stocks you care about.

Join Now: Free!