Cryptocurrency News

Charlie Lee Believes NFTs Are Very Similar to ICOs in 2017

By March 9, 2021 No Comments

Key highlights

  • Charlie Lee is the founder of Litecoin who sold his LTCs at an all-time high. 
  • Lee believes NFTs in today’s crypto market are highly similar to ICOs in 2017 
  • The NFTs market volume has increased rapidly in recent months

Charlie Lee`s view on NFTs 

Charlie Lee is famous in the cryptocurrency community as the creator of Litecoin. He is a computer scientist who has previously worked for Google and Coinbase. 

This talented scientist, who was interested in Bitcoin, started mining in the early years. The inspiration from Bitcoin led him to create a cryptocurrency himself. He first started with the project Fairbix. The project was not successful, and it had serious problems. However, the project turned out to be a stepping stone towards Litecoin, which has had great success throughout the years. Litecoin used Bitcoin as its foundation, but Lee added some tweaks in order to improve usability. 

Lee says that the NFT market has many similarities with the ICO market in 2017. Even though NFTs have been displaying astronomical growth in the last few months, Lee doesn’t seem to be too interested. The valuation of the market is now around $3.44 billion. In his Twitter, Charlie compared the NFT market to ICOs in 2017 and Altcoins in 2013. These were two large booms in the cryptocurrency industry which brought huge gains to early investors, but also burned a lot of later entrants when the respective bubbles popped.

NFTs are tokens on a blockchain that can represent either digital or physical objects – possible applications range from representing digital art to real estate, and everything in between. The total value of the NFTs market was under $300 million in 2019. However, the sector has been experiencing huge growth in 2020, and the market’s valuation is around $3.4 billion at the moment. 

Many platforms like CryptoPunks and OpenSea have massive sales for NFTs, and the action has attracted attention from mainstream artists and celebrities as well – Grimes, Deadmau5 and Jack Dorsey are just a few examples. The abrupt rise of NFTs is similar to ICOs in 2017, according to Charlie Lee. He sees many similarities like easy creation, easy understanding, and bringing many new people to the sector.