Charles Noyes, Quantitative Researcher at Pantera Capital, had a bold prediction to make during a Mena Summit last week.
The tech prodigy, who started mining bitcoin when 11 around 2010 or so, showed an almost exclusive interest in ethereum and its wider ecosystem, boldly predicting it will be ten times more valuable than bitcoin.
The little known 19 year old seems to be a prolific coder and apparently wrote a peer reviewed paper titled “Sybil Resistant P2P Range Queries over the Blockchain” when he was just 16.
His wider comments therefore, and indeed the entire session, is interesting because they highlight just at how an early stage eth is. As such, we quote at some length Noyes stating:
“I’ve been involved with ethereum since before the whitepaper was released and I’ve been thinking about when will we actually see something happen for a long time.
In many ways, people are trying to sprint a marathon before we’ve crawled. A lot of people expect that this stuff is going to happen very quickly but… it’s slow, it’s hard to code, there have been lots of security bugs and generally it’s very nascent.
But I would expect you will see a few things released this year, in 2018, that will start to give the market an inkling of what kind of things will work and how wildly successful the things that really find protocol market fit and really are able to be actually disruptive… how successful it will be in practice beyond from a speculative perspective.
A lot of stuff that is there right now is very internal. So, a couple of things like gambling are things that touch the outside world and you’re starting to see more projects that do more than just trying to fix issues within this space, but I think, at the outset of it, most of the things that will launch and be successful and be widely adopted will be things that are kind of internal to the industry and don’t go out and try to disrupt AirBnB yet.
Examples of those would be Augur, MakerDAO – very interesting project by the way for finance people, it’s essentially collateralized debt positions to create stable cryptocurrency, it’s fascinating stuff.
oX, a protocol for token exchanges. You know, fiat currency pairs scale factorially, so it’s kind of a decentralized protocol to try and help with token trading now that there’s a couple thousands of these things already.
OmiseGO, a project in South East Asia that’s trying to do very fast decentralized payments. Already partnered with a couple of extremely large companies and I think that it will be successful…
There’s a bunch out there. That’s just a shortlist of my favorites, but I think that two or three of those will launch this year and I expect that FunFair – decentralized gambling project – I think that a couple of those will launch this year.
And that’s pretty exciting because as of now there’s no real active large successful project. A couple of smaller things have been done like you’ve might have heard of CryptoKitties, it’s like cats that you can breed on ethereum, that’s been by far the most successful project so far.
So, you know, early days. But I expect that you’ll see soon, very soon – and this is the first time I’ve actually made this prediction publicly – something or somethings launch that really start to give people more of an understanding of what will be successful and how widely successful it will be when it does launch.”
“And will then bitcoin be dethroned?” – the presenter asks. “I think so,” Noyes says. “I make a prediction that by 2020 ethereum’s market cap will be ten times bitcoin’s.”
He also said “speculation drives innovation.” Adding that 95% of ICOs are worthless, but you’ll also see a “handful of very high quality, extremely disruptive, products come out.”