Erik Finman made his name as the youngest ever bitcoin millionaire and is one of 17,000 bitcoin addresses containing more than $1 million worth of bitcoin.
The young crypto enthusiast is now backing Metal, a P2P crypto payments app, which launched in 2017, but has been revamped as an “all-in-one digital banking platform for cryptocurrency.”
Finman has been predicting that bitcoin (BTC) will reclaim its $20,000 value this year, simply because of the entrance of Facebook into the crypto market with its Libra stablecoin. He also referred to the fact that candidates in the upcoming US presidential elections have been talking up bitcoin, as has Apple.
Oddly enough, last year, Finman claimed that bitcoin was dead during the worst moments of the 2018 bear market that left most major tokens down almost 90% in value.
Finman, who has also tried to encourage passive investment in bitcoin with his CoinBits project said, “Bitcoin could be at $50,000 per bitcoin without all the fragmentation.” But you can’t change the fees,” he added. “You can’t change the loading times. I’m very pro-crypto and pro-bitcoin but with just one coin you can only do so much.”
Metal, which also has the Metal (MTL) native token, peaked at over $13 per token in September 2017 as bitcoin and cryptocurrency excitement reached fever-pitch, but has failed to hold almost all of that value as users and investors dried up, slumping to just $0.30 per MTL currently.
As Billy Bambrough writes at Forbes, “Finman’s support for metal comes as Metal Pay relaunches to compete with more directly with the likes of Venmo and PayPal, payment platforms that want users to store and send cash on their apps.”
Finman’s partner at Metal, founder and chief executive of Metal Pay, Marshall Hayner said, “We’ve worked for years to make certain that all laws and regulations are met in an effort to deliver the best possible product for our user base. With this launch, we truly believe that Metal Pay has the opportunity to become bigger than bitcoin.”
In other media coverage, Finman and Hayner also claim that Metal Pay will kill off Facebook’s Libra, when the contentious stablecoin finally launches. How that works out, remains to be seen.