The enterprise blockchains and tokens appearing from major global corporations are “nonsense,” the CEO of cryptocurrency-based payment platform Abra has declared.
Barhydt: Enterprise Blockchains Are 90s Internet Hype
Speaking to Fortune in a recent appearance on its Balance the Ledger segment, Bill Barhydt delivered still rare mainstream media criticism of the emerging enterprise blockchain sector.
The current climate, he argued, is similar to the internet hype of the late 1990s.
“For about a year-and-a-half everybody was talking about this term, ‘Extranet’… taking the internet and making it work inside the firewall,” he recalled.
It’s exactly what’s happening with this enterprise blockchain nonsense; where people have this fallacy that they’re going to make blockchain work inside the firewall. It’s all going to fail miserably[.]
Pseudo-Crypto Vs. Stablecoins
Barhydt’s comments come the week after famed cryptocurrency skeptic JPMorgan Chase unexpectedly announced it would shortly start testing its own enterprise blockchain offering dubbed ‘JPM Coin.’
Notionally to help with the bank’s international settlements, the concept immediately garnered criticism from the Bitcoin community, which argued it was difficult to call JPM Coin a cryptocurrency.
The dollar-pegged asset will ostensibly serve as a USD stablecoin, JPMorgan outlined at the time, something which Barhydt himself is not buying.
“I used to work at Goldman (Sachs) and I know that straight-though settlement processing has always been a big deal. I haven’t dug in enough to know if what they’re doing actually solves that problem,” he continued.
In terms of stablecoins more generally, however, the executive is nonetheless not wholly against the innovation.
“If they help consumers get money in and out of the system and are consumer-friendly… then we’re happy to use it,” he told Fortune.
Abra raised over $35 million in funding over the past five years, since branching out into various financial services on the back of “hundreds of thousands” of users, Barhydt says.
The company is launching a native Ethereum (ETH) wallet inside its app, which will facilitate ERC20 token support. At present, Abra’s offering, including smart contracts, is built on the Bitcoin blockchain.
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