By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 25th, 2024
Blockchain pioneer Jed McCaleb, known for cofounding Mt.Gox, Ripple and Stellar, called Tron and 90% of other crypto-related projects ‘just garbage’ in a recent interview to Yahoo! Finance.
Blockchain pioneer Jed McCaleb didn’t really choose words when asked about the direction of the cryptocurrency market. In an interview with Yahoo! Finance, McCaleb called Tron and 90% of other blockchain projects “just garbage.”
McCaleb, the co-founder of Stellar, Ripple and the now defunct Mt Gox, believes the year-long pullback in cryptocurrency prices is ultimately a good thing.
Referencing to the ICO boom of 2017 McCaleb said:
“One of the nice things that comes with the market calming down—I still say it’s not a bear market—it means there’s less of that. Ninety percent of these projects are B.S. I’m looking forward to that changing. Things like Tron, it’s just garbage. But people dump tons of money into it, these things that just do not technically work.”
Tron and its founder Justin Sun has often trashed other cryptocurrencies, boasting his own token as the best of the lot. So much so that he offered developers rescue from platforms like Ethereum and EOS. McCaleb, however did not offer any justification as to why Tron is “just garbage.”
In recent time, Tron has managed to outperform Ethereum in terms of actual smart contract development and usage, while Stellar has yet to offer a smart contract development platform.
In response to, if people correctly understand Stellar, McCaleb asserts that they have misread the token.
He said:
“I don’t think they do. We’ve done a pretty poor job of marketing it and telling the world what Stellar is about. I think they have a vague notion that it’s for payments, but I don’t think they know the details and the real power of it. We’re hoping to change that in 2019, but it’s a process.”
In November 2018, Stellar partnered with crypto wallet provider and blockchain explorer service Blockchain.com to launch a $125 million XLM giveaway for blockchain wallet account holders. In order to receive $25 in XLM, blockchain wallet users had to submit identity verification documents. This was a requirement for the giveaway because Stellar and Blockchain.com wanted to prevent users from creating duplicate accounts with the intent of claiming XLM rewards more than once.
XLM Listed On OKCoin
As covered, the XLM token surged 20% in September 2018 after the announcement that digital currency exchange OKCoin would be listing Stellar network’s native cryptocurrency. Another notable development for Stellar was the acquisition of Chain, Inc. (the developer of a cloud blockchain financial infrastructure) by the Lightyear Corporation (a Stellar Development Foundation-backed “commercial entity”) on September 10th.
McCaleb joins developer Bryce Weiner, investor Tuur Demeester, and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin in lobbing verbal grenades here at the end of 2018, a year which has Bitcoin hailed as the worst possible investment choice.
However, he also also provided a counterargument to the idea that more cash flow is a good thing for the space. During last year’s bull market, the hype cycle reached levels of exuberance that blinded investors, causing many to buy into scammy ICOs and fill their portfolios full of projects with little-to-no working product in hopes of enormous returns.
McCaleb hopes “that will start to change” with the market “calming down.” He also calls million-dollar projects with “zero technical merit” a “big shame.”
With him agrees Andy Bromberg, the founder of Coinlist, a platform for running regulatory-compliant token sales, who said that the next step for crypto was figuring out “how we can turn this technology into products for people to use.”
He said:
“Bitcoin and the hundreds of other digital currencies that have popped up over the years are still largely usable only by developers.”
Still, analysts think that new institutional investors could get into the space when Bakkt will be launched by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the operator of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Stellar’s blockchain facilitated 1,024 transactions on December 30th, an average of 42 per hour. Ripple facilitated 396,354. Comparatively, Tron processed 2,845,490 transactions during the same period, and Bitcoin did 267,463 – all according to Coinmetrics.io, which tracks such information.