Justin Sun recently refuted Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s claim that “1000x price increases” for Bitcoin (BTC) and other altcoins is not practically possible.
Sun, however, believes that the crypto market’s growth has not seized and such astronomical appreciations are still possible. Sun’s opinion was echoed by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) who forecast that “crypto will absolutely grow 1000x and more.”
Recently, while giving an interview to Bloomberg, Buterin said “the blockchain space is getting to the point where there’s a ceiling in sight…there isn’t an opportunity in for yet another 1,000 times growth in anything in this space anymore.”
A few days later Buterin took to twitter to explain his stance and clear the air. He stated that media misquoted him, while explaining that there would be no longer exponential price gains in cryptocurrencies.
Buterin further stated that there is still a lot of room for innovation, growth and adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
I still disagree with this. I will say “crypto will absolutely grow 1000x and more!” Just reaching USD market cap will give it close to 1000x, (that’s just one currency with severely restricted use case), and the derivatives market is so much bigger. https://t.co/bvSttEeCmc
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) September 12, 2018
To support the claim, Buterin stated that
“A 1000x price increase [for cryptocurrencies] from today means $200T [trillion] in crypto, or ~an entire 70% of today’s global wealth being in crypto.”
Buterin’s argument was countered by CZ who tweeted that such a kind of growth is “definitely” possible for cryptocurrency sector. To justify his stance, CZ stated that the greenback is “just one [fiat] currency with [a] severely restricted use case.”
Zhao further pointed out that there is considerable potential for appreciation in cryptocurrency prices as the derivative market, which is considerably bigger, is largely untapped.
This is not the first time Zhao, the CEO of the world’s largest exchange by trading volume, has argued with Buterin. Earlier in July, Buterin had criticized centralized cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance for allegedly charging high listing fees.
Buterin said “I definitely hope centralized exchanges go burn in hell as much as possible.”
Zhao responded saying “Let’s not wish others to ‘burn in hell’. Let’s have a bigger heart, and appreciate the fact that we are part of an ecosystem.”
Zhao further stated that expectations of 100% decentralized cryptocurrency industry are not realistic and centralization of certain services was actually benefitting the sector. Furthermore, the Binance CEO stated that “there is no absolute decentralization” and centralized cryptocurrency exchanges assist in increasing the liquidity of assets, and without such exchanges, the cryptocurrency sector would have been much smaller than it is presently.
Despite these healthy arguments and clarifications, Ethereum touched a 16-month low of $167.71, before recovering to $215 levels. Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex has revealed that outstanding short position in Ether has reached a record level of 240,000 ETH.
