What Sam Bankman-Fried thinks will happen with NFTs and crypto exchanges in 2022
Which blockchain sector will flourish, and what’s not yet ripe for mass adoption just yet? FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried offers his crystal ball in a special Forkast.News video.
Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2022. In this series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchain-related fields tell Forkast.News their predictions for the year ahead.
Sam Bankman-Fried
Sam Bankman-Fried is founder and CEO of FTX, one of the world’s largest exchanges for trading crypto derivatives that this year had an average trade volume of US$14 billion per day.
After closing series B and series B-1 rounds in July and October for a total of US$1.4 billion, the two-year-old company was valued at US$25 billion.
SBF, as he is known, also founded quantitative trading firm Alameda Research in 2017 and stepped down as CEO this year.
Predictions for 2022
The NFT spring
“We’re going to start to see NFTs (non-fungible tokens) take on more of a companion role with various products, games and other things. It’s going to be less of a standalone product of buying an NFT and more an integration with a lot of partnerships… I’m guessing that we’re going to see a lot of video games start to integrate NFTs into their products.”
We’re going to see NFT tickets. We might see NFTs representing movies or representing songs in addition to just visual artwork. Anywhere that you see something that can natively be represented digitally, you might start to see NFT adoptions in that case.”
Increase in institutional adoption
“You’re probably going to see a lot of development of the banking and fiat rails for centralized exchanges. You’re going to see continual refinements of the user experiences for them. You’re starting to see a lot of institutions start transacting on centralized venues over the next year.
I’m guessing that transacting on DeFi (decentralized finance) venues is a little bit further off for most of them. I mean, it’s going to take a lot of work for a lot of institutions to figure out how to interact with crypto in any way.
But it is going to take even more work for them to figure out how to interface with decentralized protocols in terms of figuring out what the custody and clearing will be like, what the regulatory and licensing regime will be like. And those are potentially tricky questions.
Especially given the cautiousness that they’re probably going to be approaching anything, it’s going to take a while to get there.”
Crypto consolidation
“Overall, I would guess that the scope of the space will grow a fair bit, but we’re seeing some consolidation. Some of the smaller players, whether they are exchanges, wallets, payment rails or other things, are going to start to get acquired, start to merge together.
And as more and more pieces become important to a fully functioning ecosystem, they are going to start merging together.”