An executive at the US-based crypto exchange Kraken is sharing his thoughts on the catalysts behind the explosive growth of several top crypto projects.
In a new CNBC interview, Kraken chief product officer Jeremy Welch says the rising pace of adoption and technical advances are fueling the resurgence of the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Bitcoin (BTC).
“The main reasons we see for price changes in Bitcoin are typically around adoption or around new technical advances. And between both of those, any announcement, like this ETF [exchange-traded fund], that gets greater adoption and it signals strong market movement, is going to affect price.”
Along with Bitcoin, Welch says other large-cap altcoins like Ethereum (ETH) and Polkadot (DOT) are seeing major growth because of the technical changes being made to their protocols.
“The fundamentals for Bitcoin are really the technical changes, and you can see these live. That’s unlike any other kind of money before, because you can see the changes to the currency, you can see how it works directly.
So those technical changes for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, for Polkadot, for many other currencies, are definitely one of the price drivers whenever there’s a new launch.”
Ethereum recently launched a hard fork featuring an upgrade known as EIP-1559, which removes a small part of ETH from circulation for each transaction on the network.
Polkadot just announced it’s gearing up to launch Parachain auctions next month, which will essentially allow blockchains to launch on the platform.
Welch says that people of all ages and backgrounds are now tuning in to cryptocurrencies from all around the world.
“We see interest from traditional investors now and we see interest from a lot of young people, too. You see this big wave around NFTs [non-fungible tokens] and, again, we’re seeing this from all ages, all backgrounds, and everywhere over the world. Kraken supports customers in over 170 countries. This is a worldwide phenomenon around cryptocurrency adoption and the excitement of this new technology.
Everybody is up this year. Everybody is up with this new price high that we’re hitting over $66,000. That means everybody that’s invested over the last couple years is now up, and we do expect to see some continued price growth, although it’s hard to say where exactly [BTC will] land around Christmas time or through the end of the year.”
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