Bitcoin is a barometer to sense the pulse of Web3 and the blockchain industry, Aptos Labs co-founder and chief technical officer Avery Ching said on December 5, hours after the world’s most valuable crypto token crossed the $100,000-price mark.
“It's definitely an exciting milestone and it helps people to get awareness around what's going on in the crypto landscape… It is something that people need to get on the back end of that wagon with because it's going to be a big part of our future as a society,” Ching told Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the India Blockchain Week (IBW) in Bengaluru.
Ching and Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh are former Meta employees. Ching led Meta’s crypto platform team, focusing on all aspects of L1 blockchain infrastructure development and most notably Diem (formerly named Libra) blockchain.
He and Shaikh are one of the most prominent names in the global blockchain industry.
“Bitcoin's such a great barometer for the pulse of the industry. Bitcoin was launched in 2008, that's 16 years ago. It just shows sometimes these revolutions do take time. But we're just still kind of scratching the surface, in terms of where the industry needs to be in the coming decade,” he said.
Ching also said crypto has been seeing a lot of institutional adoption in 2024. Aptos, an L1 blockchain, launched its first exchange-traded product (ETP) for crypto designed by Bitwise Asset Management in November.
Rightly so, 2024 has been a turnaround year for crypto, especially for bitcoin as Bitcoin ETFs got approved by the US SEC, this year also saw bitcoin halving and American president-elect Donald Trump is pro crypto.
Ching said there will be a lot of interest in ETFs of other tokens as well.
Ching and Shaikh started Aptos in 2022, three months after quitting Meta in December 2021. The startup quickly raised $200 million at a valuation of over $1 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, 3 Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures and Coinbase Ventures among others.
In another three months, it raised $150 million in Series A in July 2022 led by crypto exchange FTX’s venture capital arm, just months before the exchange collapsed amid fraudulent activities of founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. FTX was then one of the top three global crypto exchanges.
Ching said people would finally now be able to move on from the setback from that incident and start believing in crypto again with bitcoin hitting the six-figure mark.
“Crypto has been in a place where, especially since the FTX episode, people were doubtful about if this is a real thing? Is this a scam? Is this going to die? I think now this is the inflection point at which people start to really know that crypto is here to stay,” Ching said.
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