Tell it Like it Is: Weiss Ratings Gives Controversial Grades to Cryptocoins | Finance Magnates

The crypto community has heavily criticized the ratings on social media, which gave Bitcoin a C+.

Weiss Ratings, an independent rating agency that provides grades on assets and financial institutions, released a set of grades on cryptocurrencies that rated the coins in areas such as risk, technological innovation, and other fundamentals. Bitcoin received a ‘C+’, Ripple a ‘C’, and Ethereum a ‘B’; none of the cryptocurrencies has received an ‘A’ rating.

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Weiss noted that due to “rapid changes in the data”, its crypto ratings will need to be updated on a more frequent basis than “other sectors that [they] cover.”

The ratings caught a wave of criticism across social media.

Bitcoin and Ripple fans in particular decried the ratings as yet another example of FUD–fear, uncertainty, and doubt–intended to drive the prices of BTC and XRP down so that smaller investors would dump their coins and bigger investors could then scoop them up at a discount.

In addition to the outcry, South Korean hackers reportedly initiated a Distributed Denial of Service attack on Weiss’s website.

Weiss on Bitcoin: ‘Meh’

Bitcoin’s C+ rating put the coin just slightly above average. However, Weiss commented that Bitcoin actually does receive an A in one of the four indexes that the company used to determine the grades–the Fundamental Index.

Of course, however, the coin did “fall short in two other important areas”–Weiss’s Risk and Technology Indexes. Weiss cited “repeated price crashes” and “weaknesses in governance, energy consumption, and scalability” as the reasons for the low scores in these particular areas.

Indeed, Bitcoin does have some serious technological issues that are (and will continue to) prevent the network from being widely adopted for everyday use. The network’s ongoing scalability issue still hasn’t been resolved; transaction fees and times continue to grow respectively more costly and time-consuming. (Although, effective integration of the lightning network may be able to turn things around for Bitcoin.)

Additionally, the Bitcoin network actually does have a stunningly large carbon footprint on the globe–by some estimates, the Bitcoin network uses more energy annually than some countries. As mining difficulty on the BTC network continues to increase, Bitcoin’s energy consumption is likely to continue to swell.

Ethereum co-founder and former CEO Charles Hoskinson, seemed to think that Bitcoin’s status as a historical movement should have earned the network some extra points.

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