FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried reveals ‘the next Bitcoin’

• SBF believes that the next Bitcoin will be a cryptocurrency that can scale and offers very low fees, and for him, this is Solana.
• The cryptocurrency billionaire also talked about how to pick the next 100x token, how he got started in the market, the rise of the meme coins and more.

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The question of which token is the next Bitcoin has been one that every other cryptocurrency fan seems to have a varying answer to. For some like Mark Cuban, Ethereum is the natural successor, being by far the largest altcoin in the market. For others, it’s Cardano, and even for a few, Dogecoin could be the breakout token. However, for Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO and founder of FTX exchange, the next king of cryptocurrencies is going to be Solana.

In a recent interview, SBF talked about why he is betting on Solana, why Ethereum 2.0 will not bring an end to Solana, how to pick the next coin to break out and how he got started in the world of digital assets.

Why Solana is the next Bitcoin

To pick out the next market leader, one has to look at what it would take to bring the next billion people into cryptocurrencies, SBF noted. For this to happen, the project must be able to process tens of millions of transactions per second.

One thing that I thought about a lot was “What are the blockchains that could scale to that level, that could scale to millions of transactions per second in a composable native way? I’ve been on the record a lot saying that I think Solana has a real shot at doing so, which I think is really exciting.

Related: New report says each Solana network transaction takes less energy than two google searches

Before Solana can focus on becoming the next Bitcoin, it has to first edge out Ethereum. The two compete for essentially the same market, with Solana being one of the many so-called “Ethereum killers.”

On this, SBF sought to differentiate between the adoption of a blockchain network and the value of its native token. Bitcoin, for instance, is the most valuable token, but its blockchain is rarely used for any application. Ethereum, on the other hand, is one of the most popular blockchains, but its token is not even worth a tenth of Bitcoin.

This makes it hard to predict which cryptocurrency will see its value skyrocket.

“You could see mass institutional adoption of ETH the token, whether or not you see mass institutional adoption of Ethereum the blockchain. It’s hard to make a concrete prediction about what the pricing action of that will be,” he observed.

DeFi is one of the biggest factors in determining what the next big project is, SBF believes. Solana has a significant edge over its rivals on this, SBF went on.

That’s one of the most compelling parts about it [Solana]. It has the potential to scale to the place where things need to scale to if blockchain gets huge and it has the potential to host DeFi applications for hundreds of millions to billions of people on top of it.

But despite Solana’s potential, there’s the looming launch of Ethereum 2.0. As a proof-of-stake protocol, Ethereum could potentially solve all its major challenges, virtually bringing an end to the ‘Ethereum killers’ before they even take off.

Related: Ethereum 2.0 is almost here: Is this the end for Polygon, Solana and Cardano? (Part 1)

The jury is still out on whether Ethereum 2.0 will be the end for Solana and Co. Raj Gokal, one of the founders of Solana, believes that there’s enough space for everyone to grow.

However, SBF isn’t as optimistic about Ethereum 2.0. One of the aspects he attacked is sharding, one of the ways in which Ethereum 2.0 will scale. This involves splitting the Ethereum infrastructure into smaller pieces (or shards), allowing easier and faster processing of transactions.

According to SBF, one of the cons of sharding is that “there won’t be native composability between transactions on different shards.” He believes that competition between participants in different shards will automatically disadvantage all but one user, possibly creating chaos for Ethereum.

And while he lays out compelling reasons for why Solana has the brightest future, it’s worth noting that SBF is an avid investor in the project and stands to gain from its rise. For one, he is building a DEX on Solana known as Serum. His other firm, Alameda Research, was also one of the key investors, alongside Andreessen Horowitz, in the Solana token sale that raised $314 million in June.

Picking the next big thing

While he backs Solana, SBF pointed out that there are several other digital currencies that can go ‘to the moon.’ However, picking them out can be tricky. Unlike in traditional equities where there are several factors to analyze before investing, cryptocurrencies can swing for seemingly little reason.

This is one of the key reasons meme coins have sprung up and even dominated.

One of the critical things to remember is never to invest more than you can afford to lose, he noted. Just as important is the team behind a project. Scams like Squid Game have been known to have anonymous teams, making them much risker to invest in. One must also look at the supply distribution – if one person owns an overwhelming majority of any token, then they are very likely to dump it and take off with investor money.