In a new blog post, David Marcus, the CEO and founder of Bitcoin company Lightspark, predicted that the crypto industry would need at least until 2024 to "recover from the abuse of unscrupulous players."
Bad actors have a lot to answer for, and their specter will remain with the cryptocurrency industry past 2023, according to Marcus, who is well-known for his work in the crypto space at Meta and earlier at PayPal.
Less than two months after the FTX meltdown, the effects are still unsettling sentiment as well as price performance.
FTX was only mentioned once, but he also made mention of "unscrupulous players" who continued the market's underperformance well into the next year.
"It'll take a couple of years for the market to recover from the abuse of unscrupulous players, and for responsible regulation to come through," Marcus wrote. "We won't exit this 'crypto winter' in 2023, and probably not in 2024 either."
If hodlers are forced to wait for their "silver linings," this would further scupper the historical trends that Bitcoin, in particular, has followed.
Its four-year halving cycles, which tend to promote growth in particular years, could be a problem. It is expected that 2024, the year of the subsequent halving, will see optimistic price movement; some even believe the uptrend will begin a year sooner, in Q2, 2023.
Marcus is confident that if this happens, a new and stronger industry will exist, even if the recovery takes longer than anticipated.
The Bitcoin Lightning Network, he claimed, "will start to show promise as the world's most effective open, interoperable, cheap, real-time payments protocol." He devoted special attention to BLN particularly.
Other prominent figures have also spoken out in favor of crypto's long-term prospects post-FTX.
Cathie Wood, CEO of investment firm ARK Invest, was among the most outspoken in her reaction to the devastating FTX collapse.
"The Bitcoin blockchain didn't skip a beat during the crisis caused by opaque centralized players," she said in a December tweet. "No wonder Sam Bankman Fried didn't like Bitcoin: it's transparent and decentralized. He couldn't control it."
Regarding price movement, ideas on how the first quarter of 2023 might pan out continue to differ.
Some people think the worst of the most recent Bitcoin bear market has already passed, while others keep predicting a further decline in the price of BTC to $10,000 or less.
BTC/USD continued to avoid significant volatility on Dec. 31 by trading at over $16,500 with just hours left until the 2022 yearly candle close.
