IDX Digital Assets CIO Ben McMillan thinks cryptocurrencies may experience a pullback in the near term. But on a longer timeline, the CIO believes the revolutionary technology is still in its early stages. In a statement, Ben McMillan shares four altcoin projects he thinks have important use cases. we too Cryptocoin. com, we have compiled the famous CIO’s comments on the crypto money market and his favorite altcoin projects for you.
IDX Digital Assets the model he uses says we are in a “wait and see” period
In the short term, Ben McMillan is starting to brake a bit when it comes to crypto. Ben McMillan, chief investment officer at IDX Digital Assets, which manages nearly $550 million in assets, uses a model that takes into account various momentum metrics. Right now this pattern says we are in a “wait and see” period, highlighting similarities with the start of the spring crypto bear market. The famous CIO states the following in a statement he gave:
There’s something out there that suggests buying speculation has waned a bit. And again, then you want to get the chips off the table relatively quickly.
For example, in mid-April, Bitcoin finally started with a 52% drop. Its price has remained relatively stable over the past few weeks. Ben McMillan explains:
Back in May was an excellent example. Even though we were up against all-time highs and there was a lot of excitement and positive emotion, it was precisely this kind of diminishing momentum that we saw. Our models were very sensitive to the fact that there is declining momentum in Bitcoin.
“The crypto world is as revolutionary as the internet”
Ben McMillan describes the effects of increased crypto adoption as something monumental and considers we are in the early days of asset class growth. The fundamentals of space have “never looked this good,” says Ben McMillan, noting that customers are on the rise, especially when it comes to decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, as they can see a clearer use case from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, for example. The CIO makes the following assessment:
I’m old enough to remember the early days of the internet in the early ’90s, when many people thought email was a fad or websites were a fad. And now of course they are everywhere. I think we’re at a very similar stage in the DeFi ecosystem where a lot of people are starting to see, ‘Hey, these are solving real-world problems, this might not be just a fad.’ It is as revolutionary as the internet. And I think 10-20 years from now we will all look back and laugh to think that this was a fashion.
4 altcoins that Ben McMillan likes
The famous CIO thinks that some crypto projects will disappear, just as some websites disappeared after the dot-com bubble, but he believes that four altcoin projects in particular have strong chances of sticking around and finding success. The first of these is Solana (SOL), an alternative to the Ethereum Blockchain and high transaction fees. Ben McMillan says:
We’ve been very optimistic about Solana for a long time because it represented a powerful compliment. It was a complement to Ethereum as a layer one solution, not a competitor.
Ben McMillan’s bullish position on Solana is emblematic of his “chain agnostic” outlook and his desire to diversify investments in a range of growing projects. Ethereum is currently the world’s second largest crypto by market cap and the largest Proof of Stake (PoS) network and most of the DeFi protocols are built on it. Despite this, their inefficiencies create opportunities for competitors. However, the “ETH 2.0” upgrade, which is expected to happen next year, is expected to fix many of these weaknesses.
Ben McMillan’s other favorite altcoin is Chainlink (LINK), one of the apps built on Ethereum. Chainlink helps integrate Blockchains with other Blockchains and the outside world. The CIO’s thoughts on LINK are as follows:
I think Chainlink is still an underappreciated altcoin. Oracle services provide the pick and shovel layer, the infrastructure layer, and I think that will be very important in the future.
Next up, a crypto exchange platform like Uniswap Bancor (BNT). Ben McMillan says Bancor’s original code will help them in the long run:
These guys have done a really good job of being really thoughtful when creating their protocols. What you’ve seen in the growth of DeFi Summer 2020 is that a lot of other protocols have just forked other people’s code and are released very quickly, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but has facilitated a lot of growth. But we are starting to see more appreciation for well-structured and well-thought-out DAOs. So, I think it could see a lot of interesting developments in the future, especially as institutions start to appreciate what they’re building.
Finally, Ben McMillan shares his thoughts on the acclaimed altcoin project Stellar (XLM):
When you look at the global payment network, it’s a very old technology. I could easily see something like this when it started to integrate into consumer-oriented application layers. It can take a really big chunk out of a huge multi-trillion dollar international payment network.