The co-founder of the world’s largest online encyclopedia said that he believes the current state of the cryptocurrency market bears many of the characteristics of an asset bubble.
Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales made this claim on Tuesday at cryptocurrency conference Blockshow, which is being hosted in Berlin.
“Right now, we are in a bubble. The crypto world is absolutely, definitely in a bubble. I don’t think there’s many people who would deny that,” he said, adding that the space needs some “real journalism.”
As CCN reported, the Wikimedia Foundation has been accepting bitcoin donations since 2014, shortly after Wales revealed that he was “playing with BTC.” Four years later, the organization still accepts bitcoin donations, though it has not added support for any other cryptocurrencies.
Notably, despite Wikipedia’s early support for bitcoin, Wales not been as kind to the emergence of initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a method to decentralize early stage funding.
“I think blockchain is a super interesting technology but there are a lot of fads going on right now,” he told CNBC last October. “There are a lot of these initial coin offerings which are in my opinion are absolute scams and people should be very wary of things that are going on in that area.”
The cryptocurrency market ballooned over the ensuing four months, only to crash back down toward earth during the first two quarters of 2018. Nevertheless, Wales has reitered his stance on ICOs even after the market correction.
Earlier this month, he said in an interview with VentureBeat that the ICO industry is analogous to the dot-com bubble that occurred at the turn of the millennium.
“Almost every ICO is offering nothing of value to the world. That doesn’t mean that the concept of an ICO is inherently bad — just that we are in a bubble where people are doing a lot of things that don’t make any rational sense outside of the bubble mentality,” he said. “We’ve lived through this before during the dot-com bubble.”
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