David Marcus – the former PayPal executive who worked on Facebook’s failed Libra project – believes that after everything that’s happened over the past two years, that bitcoin will still be the face of both money and payments in the future.
David Marcus Sees the Promise in BTC
Marcus, in a recent interview, revealed he’s been part of the crypto industry for some time. He, by his own admission, has “lived through” at least three separate crypto winters, though he’s confident he’s seen more than that. Regarding the crypto winter of 2022, he feels that the circumstances were relatively different compared with those of past winters. He stated:
I think that this one is different because the industry got a lot bigger. So, the downturn affected many more people, touched more consumers, more companies, more investors. There was a ton more capital deployed in this cycle versus the previous cycles. So, it’s just bigger.
However, he mentioned there’s still a lot of long-term opportunity for the market and said:
Well, look, I think that everything that’s speculative ends up in booms and busts cycles. It’s only if you build something valuable that solves real-world problems that you can create long-standing value. So, I think we’re starting on that journey now. There are a bunch of companies that [have] built things that solve real-world problems, exchanges, wallets, and many more, but there was so much speculation and teams that were just building something just for the sake of listing a token and making a quick buck, and I feel like this era is coming to an end if it hasn’t ended already, and now teams are focusing on building valuable things.
Nobody Controls It
Marcus is now in charge of a new bitcoin company called Light Spark. He’s moved over from stable currencies like Libra and is now focusing predominantly on BTC. He said:
I had this idea in the back of my mind, but I wasn’t sure yet that I was going to just take the plunge and go with it. Many friends told me, ‘You should take at least nine months off,’ and after month three, I was really going crazy, so it was time for me to get back on the horse, but why Bitcoin? Because I’ve [concluded] that if you want a true, open, interoperable protocol for money on the internet, which is what we’re trying to help build here, it [needs] to be built on something that literally no one controls. Bitcoin is the only network and asset that fits the bill when you think about it that way. There’s no consortium of companies. There’s no people at the helm. There’s no leader. There’s Satoshi Nakamoto, but who knows who they or he or she is? And that’s kind of all the value of the network.
