Welcome to the spring of crypto innovation, Alexis Ohanian

The crypto hype is gone, and that’s a good thing, according to Reddit and  Initialized Capital Co-Founder, Alexis Ohanian.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance,  he says: “So this is the crypto winter, no doubt. But a friend of mine, Brian Armstrong (CEO of Coinbase) said this is the spring of crypto innovation. And what he means is, yes, the prices are depressed. The speculators have fled. And that’s great because the people who are now building on crypto are true believers. And they’re actually builders. They’re actually building the infrastructure that it’s going to take to really make this happen.”

He adds: “For all of us who have been in this since, I mean, we were the seed investors in Coinbase back in 2011, back when it was a sort of pipe dream of really only devoted engineers. We’ve been in this for a minute now. And so we’re very comfortable having a long worldview on it because this kind of an infrastructure shift will take lots of time. And we knew that going into it. And then I think we still see people, like most recently JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is now investing in it.”

JPM Coin

When asked about JPMorgan’s JPM Coin announcement, Ohanian notes that this has come just a few years after Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud. “These are just more indications that there is real innovation that is happening now that all the wild speculation is gone. And I think that’s actually a good thing,” he comments.

“It’s a painful thing, I think, for a lot of people to see those accounts. But if you were investing in it in the first place, you really should have been thinking long-term. That’s just generally good advice for any kind of investing, but especially something so nascent as crypto.”

Jamie Dimon

Dimon became public enemy number one in the crypto world when he warned investors that if they were “stupid enough to buy Bitcoin” they would “pay the price one day.”

Earlier this year, however, he revealed that he wasn’t taking any satisfaction in Bitcoin’s recent troubles. Speaking to CNBC while at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he added: “Blockchain is a real technology; it’s just a database we can all access that’s kept up to date.”

In October 2017, JPMorgan announced a blockchain-based system that will “significantly reduce” the number of parties needed to verify global payments, reducing transaction times “from weeks to hours.” Partners include Royal Bank of Canada and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group.