Bill Barhydt, CEO and founder of the exchange and digital wallet application, Abra, said he sees the Bitcoin blockchain (BTC) as having difficulty when it comes to mass adoption of the asset chain as a store of value, given current asset technology.
„Bitcoin certainly can scale ‚out of the chain‘ today through third party custodians such as exchanges and wallets like Abra or other so-called second layer technologies such as Lightning (Network),“ Barhydt told Cointelegraph on July 15.
He added:
„When maintained that way, Bitcoin’s scalability is probably unlimited. However, Bitcoin does not yet have the scalability to be used by billions of people as a value chain reserve.
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Larger block size for daisy chain scaling
Previous reports revealed Bitcoin’s Barhydt vision of a reserve of value, similar to gold, running a less and less correlated price route compared to conventional markets. However, gaining mass adoption as a global store of value obviously requires the ability to handle high user traffic.
Over the years, several industry participants have proposed larger blocks to combat the difficulties of transaction speed. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) significantly separated from BTC in 2017, discussing larger block sizes as the answer, while others sought second-layer solutions, such as the Lightning Network, to address the problem.
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Barhydt’s comments show his confidence in second layer solutions, although he mentioned larger blocks for Bitcoin daisy chain scaling. „To chain scale to billions of people, new technologies will be required, as well as dramatically increased block sizes,“ he said. „It is possible that Bitcoin will only scale out of the chain to meet the needs of the masses in the future,“ he said, adding, „Time will tell.
Abra’s application uses each asset’s blockchain
With more than 100 different cryptographic assets available on its platform, Abra supports multiple blockchains. „The digital assets in Abra’s system today are 100% native,“ explained Barhydt. „They use whatever platform each individual digital asset of the approximately one hundred digital assets supported by our Abra application was built on,“ he added, noting the presence of third-party asset escrow coordinated in conjunction with the application.
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In the future, after a $5 million investment by the Stellar Development Foundation, or SDF, in May 2020, Abra now aims to offer conventional banking functions built into the Stellar blockchain as well, Barhydt explained.