I Believe Most Digital Tokens Will Go to Zero: Barry Silbert

By Swati Kishore

The Founder and CEO of Grayscale Investments and Digital Currency Group, Barry Silbert holds the belief that most of the cryptocurrencies will not amount to anything in the long run.

Silbert opined his views in a telephonic interview conducted by CNBC. He explained how most digital tokens will go to zero and why ICOs were never legitimate. Silbert said,

“I’m not a believer in the vast majority of digital tokens and I believe most will go to zero. Almost every initial coin offering was just an attempt to raise money but there was no use for the underlying token.”

After experiencing a surge in popularity between the time period of late 2017 to early 2018, ICOs eventually started fading into oblivion. It resulted in the prices of most of the associated tokens plummeting to new lows. When many investors got burned, regulatory bodies also started cracking down on illegal projects.

As per data from CoinSchedue, the valuation of ICOs are currently down to the levels as those experienced during January 2017. As compared to the USD 5.8 billion raised in March 2018, last month only USD 291.6 million were raised through initial coin offerings.

Even though he is pessimistic about digital currencies, Silbert is still bullish on Bitcoin. Interestingly, Silbert had invested early on in the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Silberts believes that despite showing volatility, Bitcoin has still managed to win the race to become the digital gold.

The Founder of the digital asset-baed merchant bank Galaxy Digital, Mike Novogratz, also elaborated on why he thinks that Bitcoin is a unique offering among various digital assets. Novogratz explained,

“There’s 118 elements on the periodic table and only one gold. Bitcoin is going to be digital gold, a place where you have sovereign money, it’s not U.S. money, it’s not Chinese money, it’s sovereign. Sovereignty costs a lot, it should.”

Barry Silbert-founded Digital Currency Group has established the Blockchain Association along with the support of several other companies such as Protocol Labs and Coinbase. Blockchain Association is the pioneering lobby group in the Blockchain industry in the State of Washington.