It has been said plenty of times in the past and it’ll be said again in the future. Taavet Hinrikus, CEO of TransferWise, a popular peer-to-peer international money transfer service has stated that bitcoin, is dead.
TransferWise is a prominent player in the Fintech space. Founded in 2010, the money transfers service is among the leading remittance services in the world. In six years of the company’s existence, it has raised just under $100 million in equity funding with Richard Branson and Andreessen Horowitz among the notable investors.
In comments made during an interview with Yahoo Finance , Taavet Hinrikus, CEO of TransferWise stated: Bitcoin, I think we can say, is dead. There is no traction, no one is using bitcoin. The bitcoin experiment, I think we can say, is over. Taavet Hinrikus The notion of the “failed experiment” of the cryptocurrency is one that was – with significant mainstream coverage – shared by former Bitcoin core developer Mike Hearn .
As a well-funded company in the Fintech space focusing on remittance, it was clear that TransferWise would look into bitcoin and blockchain innovation. Indeed, Hinrikus stated, “We’ve certainly paid lots of attention to bitcoin and blockchain.”
While TransferWise is solely used as a means to transfer different forms of fiat money, Hinrikus opined that he’s unaware of the problems that the cryptocurrency solves and summed it up as a gold rush. What really happened was a gold rush. People bought bitcoin because they thought it would be worth more tomorrow. And a lot of people got lucky. But we’re not seeing real people use bitcoin. And we don’t know what problem it solves. He is of a different opinion of bitcoin’s underpinning technology, the blockchain. Now blockchain, I think, is a genius advancement in technology. But I’m nto sure we’re seeing […]
