Peter Mallouk, president and CEO of Creative Partners, spoke with Quartz for the latest installment of our “Smart Investing” video series.
Watch the interview above and check out the transcript below. The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ANDY MILLS (AM): Investors might have an opportunity to invest in an ether ETF. Bitcoin and Ethereum were way up this week. Is that something people should consider getting involved with?
PETER MALLOUK (PM): The crypto space is fascinating. So right, today there’s something like 9,000 cryptocurrencies. What’s gonna happen to this space is 99.99999% of these, these cryptocurrencies are going to zero, not down 20% or 50%. To zero. Now the question becomes, is one of these actually gonna become a currency? None of them are a currency today. To be a currency, basically, if I go down the street to buy a sandwich, I have to be able to reasonably rely on the fact that I can use Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever as a currency and we’re just not there today. So all the markets is responding to is the chance that one of these can become a currency is becoming more legitimized. Whenever the financial services industry invests in ETFs and the SEC engages in approvals and so on, you’re one step closer to legitimacy. The odds that you can emerge as a cryptocurrency have gone up incrementally. But the odds that say one of these two becomes an actual currency that all of us use, I’d still put it under 10%. So this is just a speculative bet. It might be an asymmetrical bet if you win, maybe you go 10x you lose, you go down a hundred percent. I think that’s the only logical way to look at it. But if you’re asking me, would I bet that that’s gonna become a real currency someday and retain its value, my answer’s no.
AM: Initially, people were talking about it being, you know, a currency and you use it to buy things. But I’ve seen most of my friends use it as a, like a gamble or like an investment that they’re whole ‘hodling’, as they say it’s going ‘to the moon’ and they want to get rich off of this thing.
PM: Right. It’s speculating and speculating is just to the right of gambling, right? You’ve got gambling, you’ve got speculating, you’ve got investing. This isn’t the speculating camp. Most people that own this do not believe that in a year or two it’s really gonna be a currency. They’re just hoping somebody’s gonna pay more for it later. And the narrative of it becoming a currency continues to progress in the correct direction.
Read more: Ether ETFs approval could drive up the price of Ether by 60%, crypto firm says
