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.