Cathie Wood: SBF didn’t like Bitcoin because he couldn’t control it

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Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood made waves last month by maintaining her bullish stance on Bitcoin. Although the cryptocurrency had fallen more than 60% over the year to below $17,000 at the time, it confidently predicted that it would hit $1 million by 2030, reiterating a call that his company had made in April.

This weekend, she signaled her continued faith in Bitcoin and shared data to back it up, while also criticizing Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

FTX abruptly crashed last month, shaking confidence in an industry already reeling from a Crypto Winter.

On Saturday, Wood tweeted, The Bitcoin blockchain has not budged during the crisis caused by opaque centralized players. No wonder Sam Bankman Fried didn’t like Bitcoin: it’s transparent and decentralized. He couldn’t control it.

Wood also shared a link to a bitcoin report from his company, which stated:

Despite the market volatility associated with the demise of FTX, the supply held by long-term holders or supply last moved 155 or more days ago for the month of November. We believe this data point signals to holders a long-term focus and strong conviction, despite recent events. Today, the supply of long-term holders represents 72% of the total supply of bitcoins in circulation.

A view of FTX’s Bitcoin maximalists

One such long-term Bitcoin holder is MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, who describes himself as a Bitcoin maximalist. He also weighed in on the FTX fiasco this week.

You have the bitcoin community opposite the crypto community, and there’s been kind of a boiling low-level guerrilla warfare between the two camps over the past two and a half years, he said this week on the PBD podcast. . And Sam is kind of like the poster child of the crypto world.

Bankman-Fried and his ilk have always been guilty of shitcoinery, he said, or pumping and promoting unregistered securities. It’s unethical if you think I’m in front of my clients, issuing a token, manipulating the price of the token and throwing it away. on them.

Wood, speaking about the collapse of FTX, told Bloomberg last month that Bitcoin was coming off that smell of rose, while also giving a nod to Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Yes, a lot of people have lost a lot of money. The ecosystem of crypto assets loses value here. But if we were right about the underlying technology and the underlying roles that Bitcoin and Ether, Ethereum, are going to play in this new world, then I think they were going to recover pretty quickly.

Last month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the collapse of FTX held valuable lessons.

What happened at FTX was of course a huge tragedy, he told Bloomberg. That said, many in the Ethereum community also see the situation as a validation of what they have always believed in: anything centralized is suspicious by default. These beliefs also include trusting open and transparent code above individual humans.

Many prominent business leaders remain skeptical of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, of course, including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Berkshire Hathaways Charlie Munger, who called them out last month. partly fraud and partly delusion. Mark Mobius, the billionaire co-founder of Mobius Capital Partners, recently predicted that Bitcoin will fall to $10,000 next year in May, he correctly predicted cryptocurrencies to fall to $20,000.

Fortune contacted Bankman-Fried for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

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