战时 Ethereum：ETH 大幅上行的逻辑

I did an interview with Jeff Kendrick on my channel. He says Ethereum is going to be $40,000 by 2030. I've heard that from other people too. I just think directionally—I don't really get hung up on a price prediction about this. I think you're going to see Ethereum resolve in the relatively near term somewhere above $5,000.

But this is not financial advice. Do your own research. I don't know whether that's going to happen, but that's just what I'm expecting based on the history, the chart, and what I'm seeing happen in the markets. All these things are driving value to ETH; directionally, that should carry it higher.

I'm content to stay patient and watch this play out because if I agreed with David, if I thought it was already done—if the thesis had already played out, tokenization, the agentic economy, and stablecoin adoption had already happened, and Ethereum had lost all that market share to other competitors—then I would have a different view of this.

While we're still seeing stablecoin adoption just beginning to take off, real-world asset tokenization just beginning to take off, and the agentic economy just beginning to get into the first innings of its creation, I think there's a lot of reason to think that Ethereum dominates in all of those as this goes forward, and that benefits ETH, the asset.

1. Is Wall Street understanding and buying ETH value accrual?

I just think directionally higher is good enough for me right now, and much higher is also how I feel. I think there are a lot of reasons to say that is the most likely outcome here, so I'm staying patient with that.

John, thank you for joining us. How are you doing?

I'm doing really well. I'm happy to be here, and I'm looking forward to the conversation.

John, awesome to have you. We've just seen you tweeting passionately about Ethereum, and I've been enjoying all the great work you've been doing at Milk Road. The cool thing about this is that I can just reach out to you and say, “Hey, we'd love to have you on our show,” and we can make that happen. Awesome that you're here.

You're talking about a lot of things right now. You've written this series called “Wartime Ethereum.” Your first piece came out, I think, maybe a month or a month and a half ago. You just released a newer piece recently, and I think you're getting at some of the bigger-picture stuff of blockchain and crypto that's really starting to matter right now.

We've always talked about this “then they fight you” stage, and I think a lot of people have thought, “Maybe we've been through that” with things like Chokepoint and Chokepoint 2.0. We thought maybe we'd gotten past the fight, but reading one of your most recent pieces, I think it's very illuminating that the fight is really maybe just beginning. I want to get more into that and unpack all of it.

2. Why John got invested in Ethereum and ETH

But first, let's start with a bit about your background. I believe you were at BlackRock before. Just tell us a bit about your background, what you're doing at Milk Road today, and how you became so passionate about Ethereum.

Well, I appreciate the questions. I appreciate you guys having me on, and I appreciate the engagement with the pieces I've been writing and the message I've been trying to share, because I do think this is very important to discuss and to do so in a way that is educational and informative. That's something I'm very passionate about and have been for a long time, so I'm really happy to have this opportunity today.

A little bit about my background: I spent 6 years at BlackRock on the Aladdin platform in client services and relationship management. I also worked closely with our digital assets team—our digital asset strategy team—there on a couple of initiatives the firm was working on internally. One of the things was helping out with the integration between Coinbase and Aladdin, and a couple of other things as well.

During that time, I was also writing scripts for YouTube videos for one of the largest YouTube channels on digital assets, which was called Discover Crypto. I worked with them for about 2 years. Prior to BlackRock, I had also worked a little bit in the digital asset space, so this has always been something I've been passionate about.

I've been in digital assets for 10 years now, and I've just been looking for ways to move my career in the direction of digital asset wealth management and digital assets overall. This is something I've been passionate about for a long time and something I'm trying to get more involved with as the industry grows and matures.

I left BlackRock in February 2025 and have been working on a couple of different things since then, mostly consulting in the digital assets and Web3 space, writing white papers, working on tokenomics for projects, and advising family offices and VC firms on different things in the space. I started my own fund, True Capital, which we mentioned as well. We do direct investment in digital assets and have a host of institutional-grade algorithms that backstop the fund so we can outperform in any market environment.

Milk Road was a really awesome opportunity that came up for me, and I jumped at it when I saw that they were hiring for a podcast host. I love macroeconomics, digital assets, artificial intelligence, and all these sorts of things that are at the frontier of where finance and technology are today.

I'd been writing for one of the largest YouTube channels, and I've always been passionate about communication and particularly communicating about these things. It seemed like a natural fit, and I've been very fortunate to be over there. I really like the Milk Road community. I've been a subscriber to their newsletter since, I think, 2021, maybe longer, and I've found them to be a really accessible, entertaining, but informative resource for education, market commentary, and news and analysis on everything related to digital assets.

Since I've joined, we've also spun up something called Milk Road AI, which focuses on doing basically the same thing we do in crypto, but for AI and those assets, those investors, and that landscape and ecosystem. That's been really successful and really popular. I love that. I learned a lot from Milk Road AI, too.

I host Milk Road Macro, which is something I've been doing for the past year, and we're now folding that into Milk Road Crypto and Milk Road AI. I do a lot of macro analysis there and try to keep people abreast of what's going on in the macro landscape, because that's what's driving a lot of these shifts and moves of capital, as well as the economic changes that are happening.

There's just a lot going on, and I think now more than ever people have become investment-conscious and investment-minded. They're paying attention to these things, and they need to know about them, but they also don't want to have to get a PhD to understand what's happening. They want to feel like they're being informed, engaged, and entertained.

We've cultivated a community there that I'm really proud of. Our team of pro analysts comes from a diverse set of backgrounds, and they all contribute something different to the conversation with our community.

Why am I so passionate about digital assets? I see and understand the value proposition of this asset class and the thesis behind it, and I think it's becoming increasingly important as we see a lot of other things in the legacy systems start to move in directions that cause concern.

I think there is a need for protocol-level defenses of individual rights, sovereignty, capital, information, and various other things that digital assets are uniquely designed to guarantee to all people. It enshrines liberty, protects liberty, and is something that we have sought throughout our history, going back to the Magna Carta: some sort of balance between centralized authority, control, and power, in whatever instantiation that takes, and the rights of an individual.

There's this tension between collectivism and individuality, control and liberty, and authoritarianism and libertarianism. There are a lot of things at play here. I think all societies and cultures, all policies, political units, governments, economies, countries, and families go through some version of a struggle and exploration of the line between all these different competing objectives.

I think we're doing that now. I think we're doing it at an accelerating, more rapid, and higher-stakes rate. It seems to me that the digital asset space and what it can offer to participants of all kinds is becoming more and more valuable and more and more important.

And I think that all of this starts with education and communication. That's something I'm passionate about doing. I'm happy to be here to contribute to the conversation today.

3. Why Ethereum + ETH are the most important chain + asset

The digital asset space makes it sound like there's a very broad market of assets and blockchains to focus on, but in truth, the majority of liquidity and the majority of the DeFi economy lives on Ethereum. Nomadic and I have lived through our own evolution over the years, thinking maybe there's more of this multichain universe that we will live in. Maybe we still need more time, but we've also come full circle to fully appreciate the security of Ethereum, the network effects of Ethereum, and just how difficult it is to pull off what Ethereum has pulled off over the last 10 years.

So, I do want to talk a bit about one of your more recent pieces that's titled Wartime Ethereum, but maybe we just start with a little more about the why behind ETH. Why do you focus so much of your time and attention on Ethereum and ETH, the asset, in DeFi?

Because the market has focused the bulk of its time, attention, energy, and capital on Ethereum—the network, the ecosystem, and the asset. I think that that's something you should be responsive to. I think you're absolutely correct. Most of the innovations that have come out of the digital asset space have started on or been deeply rooted in Ethereum. I think that Ethereum has the lion's share of most of the major things that are driving the digital asset space right now.

Whether it's tokenization of real-world assets, stablecoin adoption, or the agentic economy that's coming and coming fast, I think Ethereum is going to have the lion's share of these things. Ethereum has been very strategic about being slow, secure, but also scalable. If you're looking at this from an institutional perspective, things that are very important to them are the minimization of counterparty risk.

In the digital asset-native space, we call this decentralization or credible neutrality. In the TradFi space, they call this counterparty risk, right? Avichal Garg talked about this on the Empire podcast recently, but Ethereum has something that is very difficult to offer the market, which is credible neutrality. This is a CROPS thing, right? Censorship-resistant, open, permissionless, private, secure, scalable—and it's a global financial, economic, monetary infrastructure that is a highly valuable thing.

It is very difficult to counterfeit or reproduce, and it is something that Ethereum has spent a decade developing in a decentralized manner and offering to the markets in a way that is, to use the word, impressive. However, I'm also looking at the markets, and just like you said, outside of Bitcoin, you're looking at something like—I think—80% of the capital in the Ethereum ecosystem in some form or another. A lot of these other options or solutions either don't have the credible neutrality that Ethereum offers, or they don't have deep enough liquidity. If your whole ecosystem only has $1 billion or $2 billion of liquidity in it, then you're not going to be ready for prime time in terms of institutional adoption.

There are a lot of things that Ethereum has that make it a distinctive ecosystem and asset. The biggest ones to me are, like I said, that impressive credible neutrality that it's offering the market, the deep liquidity that it offers, the track record that it offers, and the security that it offers, right? 10 years of uptime, no downtime, and some of the most impressive achievements in terms of upgrades to the network without any failures, interruptions, or shutting down.

The Sui blockchain, I think, is a really technically impressive blockchain ecosystem, and its team is one of the best in all of digital assets. Just a few months ago, its blockchain paused 4 times, right? That's not something you've ever seen on Ethereum.

I think that all these things combine to make a really compelling and unique value proposition for Ethereum, the ecosystem, and Ethereum, the asset. I think that merits attention. While I'm dogmatically not a maxi about Bitcoin, Ethereum, or anything else, I'm very interested in digital assets overall, and I try to learn from everything that's going on and being developed across digital assets.

I think Ethereum is very unique for a number of these properties and very compelling for a lot of these reasons. I think it's something that needs to have a lot of attention, right? If it's got the lion's share of the market, the lion's share of the mindshare and the innovation, and the capital that's going into the asset class, it deserves the lion's share of attention and education.

So, that's how I think about ETH and why I think it's such a compelling story as a network and as an asset, and why I focus a lot of my attention there.

Your first piece that we've been referencing, this Wartime Ethereum piece, has a thumbnail image of Mel Gibson as William Wallace, screaming in blue war-face paint, and the title of the piece is Wartime Ethereum. Let's break down just what you're getting at with this. Why is this an important time? Why is this Wartime Ethereum mode?

I think there's a number of ways to think about this. First of all, Wartime Ethereum, as I said in my essay, just sounds cool, right? It's the kind of energy we need right now. We need people who are fired up about this, who are committed, who are passionate, and who are leaning in rather than getting burnt out, rage-quitting, capitulating, or checking out.

4. Ethereum doubles down on “can’t be evil”

I think now is a more important time than ever, at least in Ethereum's recent history, for people who are passionate not just about number go up, but about what we're building in this space, to lean in, participate in discussions, educate themselves, and pay attention to what's happening inside of Ethereum and outside of Ethereum. It's really a call for engagement, a call for investment, a call for attention, and a call for people to reignite what got them passionate about this in the first place beyond just pump-and-dumps, scam coins, and all these other things that the space is known for—all these negative things—but to refocus on what's important about Ethereum, what's important about digital assets, and to believe in something, right?

We say this all the time, but it really does matter. It's not just about, “Can we build a better mousetrap than Wall Street?” It's about saying, “Hey, there's something really important about this technology and about these assets that we are trying to offer the world,” and it's not okay to just get bored and quit or take your marbles and go home because you're frustrated for this week, this month, or this bear market. There's a longer story here. There's a bigger value proposition here, and there's much more at stake than just whether or not it feels frustrating this month.

I think that's what I was trying to get at. Every time I answer this question or think about this for myself, I answer it a little bit differently. But Wartime Ethereum is just about believing in something and being committed to trying to improve, showing up every day, getting better, doing better, and improving the value proposition of ETH and of Ethereum.

To do that as part of a community, it's not something that any one person can or should be responsible for on their own. I think that's what ETH Labs is about. I think that's what the downsizing of the Ethereum Foundation is about. I also think Vitalik's example of the Ethereum Foundation owning, I think, 0.16% of the total supply of ETH, but Vitalik having 90% of his personal wealth in ETH, is exactly the kind of dynamic we want.

We want total personal commitment, but also total commitment to decentralization, with not even an opportunity for compromising that. That's what I think is so important about this. In all these legacy systems, we have systems of trust. In Ethereum, we have a system of truth, and that is what is so important here.

It's not “Don't be evil,” like Google used to say. It can't be evil. That is, I think, a really important distinction here. That's what Wartime Ethereum is about to me: to say that this matters. That's worth staying committed to and fighting for, and not giving up on just because we're in a bear market right now.

I’ve got to do a quick rant here because you just hit me with that line from Google, “Don’t be evil.” I don’t know if you guys saw this, but a couple of months ago, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, was at the University of Arizona. He was doing a commencement speech or something, and he essentially got booed off the stage.

He kept saying things like, “You should all start playing with AI right now because I think you’re going to be working for it in the future anyway.” And then things like, “Hey, get on the AI rocket ship now because it’s leaving, and you don’t want to be left behind.” People were just booing him.

Again, it’s funny to see where Google came from. You mentioned one of their slogans when they were IPOing: “Don’t be evil.” They ended up dropping that slogan. It changed to something different, but it kind of fell away.

The Ethereum community always talks about Moloch. If you remember Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, with its Moloch section, it was kind of broken down by another guy—I forget his name—but it was so artfully broken down. This idea is that you can make 1,000 decisions based on incentives and then wake up one day and not even know where you are.

I feel like you look at a company like Google, which started with “Don’t be evil.” I’m not necessarily saying Google is evil, but look where they’ve gone: part of the military-industrial complex now, part of collecting data on probably every U.S. citizen, and working with governments on the frontier of AI. Again, I’m not saying that’s bad, but it’s very hard not to let that creep into your organization.

I feel like what Ethereum does, or has done, is resist Moloch at literally every instance. And CROPS is just them saying, “Hey, we’re going even further away from that possibly happening.” This idea of believing in something—it’s so weird to start attaching belief to an investment. I’ve struggled with this, but Ethereum is something totally different.

They say, “Don’t marry your bags,” but there’s so much more wrapped up in this than just an investment and money. It’s morals, it’s truth, it’s the properties that you were talking about earlier: uncensorability, uptime, and the permissionless nature. Anybody can access this.

I didn’t mean to get on my soapbox here, but ETH, the asset, can be a weird one to grapple with yourself, just because of all these things in life that it grapples with as well.

5. Ethereum is trustware for building economic systems

So, I would like to respond to this. This is something that I talked about in my debate with David Hoffman after he sold his Ethereum, or his ETH. I think he’s basically saying that Ethereum, the network, is good and offers the world all these things, but that ETH hasn’t really reflected that in its price. It’s sort of gotten the price it deserves, and it’s not going to get repriced higher or lower. So, he sold his bags.

I think this is not just a philosophy thing. It’s not just a morals-and-values thing. All of finance is downstream of faith. The whole system is based on faith, and Ethereum's chief product is faith—but not just faith in “trust me, bro,” but truth, right? There’s a higher degree of faith that is offered by Ethereum, and it is instantiated by ETH, the asset.

The reason this is so important is that if the market is looking at this landscape of options—in terms of ecosystems, monetary assets, or places where it can conduct economic activity—the place where it has the most trust, the highest degree of trust in credible neutrality, censorship resistance, openness, security, privacy, scalability, and all these different things, is captured by this CROPS acronym.

The reason that matters so much is that all of finance is downstream of that faith and that trust. If Ethereum offers the market the strongest economic solution, monetary solution, and financial solution of trust upon which to build economic systems of activity, that brings the world’s most pristine capital assets, capital markets, investors, and users. That brings more adoption. That brings more demand for ETH and more transaction volume.

You’re talking about an addressable market of $700 trillion or so in assets and an intraday volume of—I mean, FX swaps alone are like $5 trillion to $9 trillion in volume every day, right? So, if all of this stuff is looking for a more credibly neutral system of faith and trust, and Ethereum becomes that more robust trust solution that attracts that capital, those users, and that adoption, it deepens the value proposition of the whole network and of the asset.

Then it brings this next wave of agentic activity in commerce, too, because agentic activity will follow where all that capital is, where all those pristine assets are. That drives the burn mechanism, that drives value to ETH, the asset, and that drives the “number go up” thing that David was talking about. That’s just the definition of a functioning economy and the monetary asset of that economy.

This is why these things matter. It’s not just pie-in-the-sky moral philosophizing. If Ethereum is able to offer the market that solution, with all of these different attributes of finance from which all finance is downstream, that is an inherently economically valuable thing that will be reflected in the price action and in the economic behavior of the global ecosystem.

Economics is just the study of the allocation of scarce resources. It’s really an anthropological study of human behavior based on a certain set of incentives. That is why this is so important, and that’s why these things matter. It’s not an abstract, woo-woo, vibey thing. It’s a very concrete, important part of what all of economics and financial activity relies on.

Finance—a really simple way to think about finance is that if you’re taking on the capital risk to plant potatoes, but you don’t know what the potatoes are going to be worth in the market a year from now, you sign a contract, right? Somebody says, “I’ll give you this number of dollars, this price, for the potatoes.” That allows you to say, “Okay, I know I can sell the potatoes for this much. I can afford to raise this much and get this many potatoes.” Then you have financed your operations, right?

But that’s all downstream of faith in that contract, the one you signed with that person. This is why these things matter. It’s not an abstract thing; it’s extremely concrete.

The whole fiat system comes from the word faith. Fiat is the Latin word for faith. It’s all trust that debt will be repaid, that the Federal Reserve will have its debts paid by the U.S. government and the U.S. Treasury Department.

This is an important thing because we in Ethereum talk about this a lot, and people ask, “Why does this matter?” It matters a great deal. It matters on Wall Street a great deal. Credible neutrality, security, and deep liquidity are all things that institutional investors, economic actors, and financial actors of any kind are seeking, whether or not they can articulate it. That’s why this is so important, why Ethereum is so unique and compelling, and why I’m excited to be here.

I appreciate how you’re tying together the success of Ethereum the network and ETH the asset. Part of the reason we’re so excited to have you on is because you’re so good at communicating how all of that value is tied together.

My follow-up here is much simpler. Because of your background working at BlackRock and because of your colleagues and peers in traditional finance on Wall Street, I’m wondering what the state is of how all of this is translating to them.

I understand that tokenization is becoming a more understood concept—the idea that trillions, hundreds of trillions, in assets could be tokenized—but, again, it still feels like we’re so early. Obviously, stablecoins are a killer product-market fit, a product that banks and everyone are adopting.

Are they getting it? Because that’s going to be the most important thing, I think, for Ethereum to continue to be successful: having those serious capital allocators choose to put their liquidity on Ethereum, build DeFi-related products on Ethereum, or work with DeFi-related protocols on Ethereum. What can you tell us about the conversations that happen behind closed doors?

Yeah, they are definitely getting it. I went to a BlackRock alumni event at their Hudson Yards office, where I used to work, with Joe Shalom of SharpLink. He used to work there, too, before he went into the Ethereum community.

There were a lot of conversations around these things, and a lot of people who used to work at BlackRock now work at firms focused on these things. Wall Street gets this. They understand this. This is a very easy thing for Wall Street to understand, and I’ll tell you why.

It’s because it’s an order-of-magnitude, or at least a stepwise, improvement on all the different things that are important to them about the systems they’re using, across every measure and for all stakeholders. It completely dominates in every way the solutions they’re using today. The main things they focus on are efficiency.

It’s a much more efficient, much less cost-intensive way of doing business. I don’t know if you guys know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, but I like to liken the current financial infrastructure to a complex Rube Goldberg machine of nine different systems all trying to work together. It takes 30 days to actually settle, and you don’t know who’s got what or when. There’s all this expense that comes from that, and you have to leave a bunch of capital tied up behind the scenes to make sure that everybody feels like they can trust each other.

It’s just a really inefficient, grossly inflated, bloated, costly system that backstops things like credit card transactions and stock trading and all these different things. It’s just a mess. Ethereum blockchain solutions are way more secure. There’s way less room for errors, like human error or typos. You’d be surprised how much manual data-entry mistakes still cause problems for Wall Street.

A lot of private credit is just being done off people’s Excel sheets that they’re emailing back and forth to each other. So, yeah, there are just a lot of security benefits that come from this. And then the scalability: it’s so much easier to onboard people and scale these things.

Another thing I think is important to mention here, too, is that access to the innovation of the public blockchain infrastructure that Ethereum has is a really huge lift and incentive. It’s something that I think is very attractive to institutions that people don’t really appreciate because they don’t think about it if they’re not in one of these 2 worlds.

All the different innovations that have come out of the digital asset space have been really transformative. They created new markets where there weren’t markets before. They’ve improved old ones, like automated market makers, decentralized finance, and prediction markets. Perpetual futures contracts have been around for a long time. They never really went anywhere until crypto came along and really made this a robust market.

Now, it’s something that is finally getting legalized in the United States and beginning to proliferate here, but it’s a many-billion-dollar industry that is pricing IPOs before they launch, even more accurately than the underwriters can do, and all kinds of different things. It’s giving much broader participation of capital and bringing so many more kinds of investors and pools of capital into the global capital markets.

There are just all these innovations happening in public blockchains. If you are a participant in that, you get the benefits of it for your business, for your assets, and for the things that you’re building. These are all reasons why this is just better for all stakeholders in the process. It’s a pretty easy lift for Wall Street.

The thing is, they also see that controlling this is a very lucrative thing as well. The way I’ve seen this playing out is that I think a lot of the asset managers have a contractual obligation to be fiduciaries, which is another word that comes from faith. It means a trusted actor who acts in your best interest and behaves as though your best interests are theirs, and not in a selfish manner, or manages your assets in some way that benefits them over you.

That is something that a lot of asset managers understand fundamentally, and so they are just willing to use whatever the best system is on the market—whatever the best protocol or the best asset is—for their clients’ capital. But banks, on the other side, in my view, have a business that largely depends on the custody of assets. BlackRock is an asset manager; they don’t custody anything. Coinbase has a custody solution. JPMorgan, the Bank of New York Mellon—I think it has over $50 trillion of assets under custody.

A lot of their business depends on keeping control of capital and assets. They are much more reluctant to just use the public blockchain infrastructure, and they’re trying to launch their own and create their own consortiums. They’re trying to keep stablecoins, assets, and capital all on rails that they own and control because that’s their business model, that’s what they’re used to, and that’s how they survive.

I think that a lot of that is now obsolete, or let’s say, at best, optional. You’re seeing a lot of fighting happening about this because this is the first time where this has started to actually get political and regulatory tailwinds and really come into the marketplace to compete with some of these players.

They are fighting it very hard. If you have $50 trillion of assets under custody, you can fight it pretty hard in a lot of very creative ways that you wouldn’t have expected before you ran up against a juggernaut like that.

In any event, I think there are just a lot of moving parts. There are a lot of stakeholders and a lot of people who see value in this, and they don’t necessarily want to give it up without trying to play for it. They want to issue their own stablecoin, issue their own tokenized asset, and own the L1s where all these things settle because they keep all that capital in their ecosystem and, effectively, in their coffers, and rent it back to their users.

That can seem like a relatively fungible experience from a user perspective, but if you actually understand who owns what, who has the control, and what’s actually happening there, you begin to recognize the value and necessity of public blockchain infrastructure and all these things, like censorship resistance, open, permissionless, private, secure, and scalable.

6. The largest institutional bull run vs bearish retail sentiment

All those things factor into this, but Wall Street absolutely gets it. I want to underline this: I’ve been trying to highlight this point to our community at Milk Road for a long time. We are seeing the largest institutional bull run in the history of digital assets at the same time that retail investors are checking out and tuning out and their sentiment is abysmal.

That is a big bullish divergence, but it is also a troubling and worrisome gulf to me because I think that if people are not in the trenches chasing meme coins on Solana or some bright, shiny object and getting filthy rich, they have a tendency to look elsewhere for the next thing that’s going to pump this week, as opposed to recognizing the huge amount of value and the fundamental adoption that’s happening in this space and allocating patiently, allowing the market to come to them.

That is something I’ve just been concerned about because I don’t want retail to miss out on getting in on the ground floor of the next century of finance because they were chasing something else, got distracted, tuned out, or rage-quit.

All of Wall Street is hiring for this rapidly. They’re reallocating resources, bringing in talent, and moving in what, in Wall Street speeds, is a breakneck-speed rush toward adoption of all these technologies—tokenization, stablecoins, all of it.

But from the DeFi-native side, or the crypto-native side, it seems like it’s moving at a glacial pace. I assure you, they are going as fast as they can and faster than they’ve moved on almost anything, maybe in their history. The chairman of the SEC says he wants to tokenize everything in 2 years, and that’s a really tight deadline for Wall Street to turn around such a major undertaking.

They’re rapidly innovating, rapidly prototyping, and looking for what makes the most sense. They are coming as fast as they can, and I don’t think they are going to leave once they get here. They’re going to onboard trillions of dollars of capital in various ways. It’s going to take time to roll all this out, but it’s not slowing down. The genie is not going back in the bottle. That’s the opportunity here.

You’re already seeing Ethereum leading on adoption across all of these things, across tokenization, stablecoins, and all these other areas. The usage of Ethereum keeps making new highs. Ethereum keeps innovating and adapting and unlocking new forms of applications, activities, and innovations that weren’t possible before.

We’re going to see things like high-frequency DeFi and agentic commerce, reputation systems and solutions for agents, for humans, and for all these things. So, yeah, long-winded answer, but the institutions get it. They’ve got it, and they’re coming for it.

Oh, man. Totally agree. We had Robert Leshner on the podcast recently, and I think people who see how the sausage is made behind the scenes in that legacy world really get this. In one of his answers, I think I asked him something about why they’re so excited about this—something similar to what we asked you—but he basically spoke to the efficiencies. Then he was like, “Look, a lot of the stuff runs on the systems that you mentioned, but this old COBOL programming language that was built in the 1950s. The system just hasn’t had an upgrade for a long time, in part because it’s probably very hard to upgrade a system like that when it’s in motion.”

So this really is the upgrade for the financial system. I used to say that and almost not believe it 2 years ago. I think I was just parroting something that somebody said: “Yeah, that sounds good. That’d be great for my bags.” But now it’s like, no, no—I believe it wholeheartedly, and it’s happening.

7. When strong fundamentals translate to number-go-up for ETH

We also had Johann Eid, the chief business officer for Chainlink, on the podcast, and he basically laid out: Look, this stuff with these guys happens very slowly, and then once they get it, once they’re all in, it happens all at once. I really think we’re close to that. But getting back to investors, you talked about this bullish divergence: institutional players, TradFi, Wall Street, whatever, are more excited than they’ve ever been about blockchain, while retail is literally dead—no pulse. It’s pretty much some of the lowest sentiment I’ve seen since I’ve been in the space. I could probably count on one hand 5 moments like this.

Why is it taking so long for this to translate into value for some of these retail investors who are still clinging to hope? When does this value start to translate into Ethereum and ETH holders? In your piece, too, you get at this with the time horizon. So I guess, where are we right now in your mind, John?

Yeah, I think this is a tough question because timelines are always difficult to guess at, and anytime you do, you’re going to be a little bit wrong in one direction or another. I said this in my debate with David Hoffman: This doesn’t happen in 1 cycle or 2. This is a much longer road map and a much longer process, and we’re playing for a much bigger thing than just a 1-cycle or 2-cycle opportunity here. It’s a macro asset. It’s a macro change. It’s literally the Western financial system going through an upgrade.

You mentioned Chainlink. Sergey Nazarov said that this is information technology—the internet, basically—coming for finance, and that doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen quickly. A lot of the early iterations or phases of the internet existed many decades before people figured out what email was. I remember being a little kid seeing all these anchors talk about, “What’s email?” It just takes a while to get there. It takes longer than you want, longer than you expect, and it will frustrate you in the process, but it is happening. It is coming.

To me, that’s the opportunity. You can see where this is going. Wayne Gretzky said, “Skate to where the puck is going.” This is where the puck is going, and you can skate here and just hang out and let the market come to you a little bit. People get impatient with that. I think the reason for that is that there’s this huge hot ball of money—we’ve colloquially started to call it that—of speculative capital rushing around the markets looking for a return, a pump, a euphoric dopamine rush of, “Oh boy, oh boy, I got some capital back.”

We’ve seen this go through the CryptoKitties craze on Ethereum and the ICO craze. Then there was the Solana Pump.fun and all that stuff. We even saw this in the precious metals: Gold and silver had blowoff tops earlier this year, and now we’re seeing this in the semiconductor trade and the SpaceX price, which went way up like a rocket and came back down. There’s a lot of capital seeking a return, seeking risk, and seeking what’s happening right now, this week.

While that attention and energy are in other places in the market, it can be very demoralizing, frustrating, and exhausting for people to wait and be patient while these things are playing out. Ethereum is not the only thing in the market that has a very strong fundamental adoption or fundamental investment thesis that’s just not getting attention right now. A lot of companies in the S&P 500 have great P/E ratios and great free cash flows but can’t find investor attention because everybody is focused on AI, semiconductors, space, and so forth.

I think that’s just the way the markets are, and that’s always been the case. There are going to be things that have euphoria and enthusiasm at a given time and things that don’t. It depends on what makes sense for your capital and what you’re looking for—whether you’re looking for a trade or an investment, short-term or long-term. I think that’s just the nature of it, and that’s why it’s not easy to stay patient and confident in an investment for a long time while it plays out.

I do think there’s a book—I can’t remember the name of it now—but some investor said that the money is made in the waiting. You have to be able to endure, with equanimity, your portfolio dropping 50% and just keep hanging out. Charlie Munger said that. I think that’s just how I think about this.

It’s not that there’s a right or wrong way to play these markets or invest your capital. Everybody has to come up with the solution that makes sense for them, their needs, their capital demands, and so forth. But for me, I think the thesis on Ethereum is very clear. To me, I see it as the best risk/reward on the market for the next 5 to 10 years because there’s such a huge upside, and you can see that it’s already winning at capturing that market.

Until something changes—like if we tokenize all $700 trillion and that lands on Sui, Cardano, Solana, or something else—I’d be like, “All right, well, maybe the thesis on Ethereum isn’t so clear anymore.” But as long as that hasn’t happened, it’s still too soon to call this, and Ethereum is still the front-runner. I don’t see the reason to move away from the one that’s leading the race for the next century of finance while the race is still being run.

That’s how I look at this. I’m patient in that way, and I think a lot of other people aren’t. I understand why. There’s not a right or wrong answer there, but those are 2 different ways of looking at this. I would just encourage people to make sure they’re re-underwriting their process, their thesis, and how they’re allocating their capital, and make sure it makes sense to you, because you don’t have to make it make sense to anybody but yourself.

Yeah. The real opportunity is in knowing some truth that the majority of folks don’t know, betting on that, making a concentrated bet, and then being patient enough to watch that play out. I think where we are right now in terms of the adoption of Ethereum and the value accrual to ETH is about as obvious to me as it was when I got into the space in 2017.

I quickly started to understand how unique Bitcoin was at the time. I was also fascinated by Ethereum early on and got into ETH. Bitcoin was the simple sort of digital gold—something you hold and can transfer in terms of value. It’s outside of the control of governments, it’s permissionless, and it provides 24/7 access. It was such a simple value proposition.

My first bear market was pretty painless. I definitely had some moments of fear about whether this space was going to go into a longer-term bear market than what played out, but I knew what I knew. I had spent so much time thinking about it, studying it, watching podcasts, and reading white papers, including the Bitcoin white paper. Long story short, it just felt so obvious.

The big mistake is that I wish I could have borrowed more money back then to buy more Bitcoin. Nowadays, I’m looking at ETH and thinking Ethereum has so much demand right now, just in terms of stablecoins. The amount of stablecoins—I think we’re around $160 billion as of this recording—but then there’s, I believe, around $30 billion of stablecoins across all chains. There’s so much demand for stablecoins, and you have the powers that be within the U.S. government acknowledging that and seeing it as a distribution tool, leaning in, and basically stating very clearly that we’re going to use U.S.-dollar-denominated stablecoins to continue to enforce the dominance of the U.S. dollar.

8. CLARITY Act will be a tailwind for Ethereum’s growth

It's huge. So you've got the government actually looking favorably upon this and seeing opportunity in it. All of the regulatory headwinds are basically gone. Then I wanted to bring it back to the Clarity Act. In some of your pieces, especially “Wartime Ethereum,” I think you referenced what a win for digital assets, and Ethereum specifically, it will be when the Clarity Act passes—and whether its passing is actually a good thing, or whether it being passed with garbage that's been allowed to ultimately be approved along with the bill.

Well, first of all, I cannot imagine Congress passing anything with garbage in it, so I don't know what you could be talking about.

Look, I think that the concern I've had with this is that the longer this has dragged on, the more fingers have gotten into the stew here, and the more the language has been carefully gone over and fine-tuned. I think it's been gerrymandered, frankly. This has gotten away from what it was originally meant to be, which was primarily a market structure bill, something to protect DeFi developers, enshrine some basic things about the ability to do business and conduct business in the United States in digital assets, and give the market some clarity around that.

It's now turned into something where it feels like it's more of a bill to protect the banks than to help the digital asset space. My concern is that if you get a future administration that's again hostile to digital assets—as we've seen, a lot of people in not just the American government but governments around the world are still hostile to the idea of public blockchains, permissionless assets, and permissionless financial infrastructure—this could be used as a weapon to bog down the entire digital asset space in bureaucratic legal paperwork, waiting periods, and double-talk. It can be a quagmire, a Trojan horse.

I think that's a shame, because I think we do need the Clarity Act. People haven't given up. Tim Scott, Cynthia Lummis, and many other leaders in the Senate have still been trying to work toward a solution for this. But there are still people raising fresh concerns, like Eleanor Terrett. I can't remember exactly who, but she's been reporting on this a lot. She just published something on X recently about 4 law enforcement organizations that sent a letter to Patrick Witt, the White House executive director on digital assets, and the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, about concerns regarding their ability to enforce the law if the Clarity Act goes through with certain things in the language.

So there are new concerns coming up all the time. Jamie Dimon keeps moving the goalposts, shifting what his objections are, and using ad hominem attacks against Brian Armstrong and others. I don't know. I'm just not optimistic that this comes through anymore. I think it's gone on so much longer than anybody thought it would because there are so many people who are still adamantly opposed to this.

The window of opportunity for it to pass is getting tighter and tighter. They're trying to get it through the House and the Senate in July and get it signed by August, but the latest deadline keeps changing and getting pushed back. Eventually they're going to recess, and then we'll see what happens in the midterms. It could be 2027, 2028, or 2030—who knows when we'll get another chance to actually get legislation through on this?

It's one of those things where I would like to get certain things in the bill. I'm very concerned about certain things that have been changed in the bill and added to the bill. Who's it actually for? Who is it actually protecting and helping? I'm really concerned about how it actually looks in practice once it's applied, once the bureaucrats get their hands on it, and once it starts being applied in the executive branch.

Getting relief from an executive branch that's applying legislation written in a vague way, or in a way that they can weaponize, is a very expensive thing. Going through the courts can be time-consuming and costly and, in many cases, prohibitive to businesses doing activities in the space. So I'm not really sure if it goes through. I'm not really sure if I'm a big fan of it anymore. I have a lot of misgivings, but we'll see what happens.

I do think that on the other side of whatever regulatory changes come through, there is going to be a “then they fight you” stage that looks different than it has so far. There are a lot of major players—tech companies like Meta, Apple, Google, whoever—who might launch their own kinds of wallets and DeFi projects. Meta just announced it's going to be going into prediction markets. They could launch their own kinds of assets and stablecoins. It's not clear yet what that competition looks like.

You can see the same thing from financial institutions, banks, and other exchanges, traditional exchanges, and so forth. There's going to be a messy middle once there are clear rules of the road, where you see a proliferation of products, competing services, and products in the market. Ultimately, I think the beneficiaries of that are going to be users themselves and their capital, because they're going to be spoiled for choice.

There is going to be a lot of really strong competition between different players over capital, over users, and over all kinds of things to get adoption of their products and services, or their version of these things. There is going to be innovation that comes from that, because these companies are going to be trying to give themselves an edge over one another in that marketplace. I think overall it's going to result in things that are net good for the end user, the consumer, and the global economy.

But I'm a little bit concerned with what it actually means in practice and who it's trying to give an advantage to in that playing field once we get there. It's changed a lot from what it originally was supposed to be, and that always makes me a little suspicious. We'll see how it plays out here. It's not as clear or as clean as it was before, and on the other side of it, we're going to see even more increased competition. It'll just be a huge knife fight for market share.

Yeah, I think on Polymarket, it's at its lowest level in many months for the chance of it passing in 2026. I've just pulled it up right now. It's down to 43%. I think it's been as high as 75% or 80%. But that doesn't look good either, where people are putting their money on the chances of this passing.

9. There is no EF funding crisis, the ecosystem is reshaping

I want to get your take on something else. Speaking of changes, the Ethereum Foundation has started to downsize. I think there's been some misinformation out there calling this a crisis in funding. I don't see it that way. But in the wake of that, there's also been this emergence of ETH Labs.

I believe it's backed by BitMine and SharpLink. I think Konstantin Lomashuk is in there as well. I'd love to get your take on what you think of this. Is this a net good? Just your general thoughts on this new organization starting up—or not a foundation, but this new organization starting up.

Yeah, so this is something that David Hoffman and I talked about a lot in the debate that we had, and that he has been calling for for a long time. I think David caught a lot of flak for what he did, but what he did brought a lot of attention to an acute need in the Ethereum ecosystem. Attention brings conversation, conversation brings investment, and investment brings solution ideation. We've seen the emergence of this organization to help deal with a lot of the concerns David was raising.

I'm really bullish on this. I think the Ethereum Foundation has been clear that subtraction, subtraction, subtraction is part of its mandate. It wants to be just a node among nodes that participates in the governance, maintenance, and creation of Ethereum. It does not want to be dictators. Vitalik does not want to be the emperor of Ethereum. I think all these things are positive.

What we've seen, and what was couched by critics or FUDers as an exodus from the Ethereum Foundation, an exodus of talent, or a crisis of funding, is really just the Ethereum ecosystem reshaping and recreating itself and recreating governance. I think “ecosystem” is the right word here. There’s a debate over the proper way to govern anything, and James Madison said, “If men were angels, we would not need government.”

But we do not have a bunch of angels. We are imperfect. We need governance. We need governments. People argue that a benevolent dictator, like a loving, all-powerful God, is the best kind of government. But that is not practical and that is not realistic, because if you try to instantiate that on Earth, you cannot trust whoever your emperor is to always be benevolent.

Then there's the question of benevolent to whom? Can you trust the next person to be benevolent? So we have to innovate other solutions here. Democracy—direct democracy—is another form of tyranny of the majority. The foundation of Western civilization comes from Plato; in his book The Republic, Socrates starts out by criticizing democracy as another form of tyranny and dictatorial control, which is not optimal.

Right. So we have a constitutional democratic republic in the United States, which has laws that constrain the power of the governors, the powers of the executive, and the centralized authority. And we still have people having the ability to participate.

An ecosystem is something where every participant in the ecosystem has agency. It's a form of governance, which people don't think of it as, but it is. An ecosystem is a form of governance where everybody participates, and everybody has as much agency as anyone else to co-create the ecosystem, the life bubble, the environment that they're living in.

That's what Ethereum is striving for. So that's what I see this as: a move towards decentralization, a move towards ecosystem governance as opposed to imperial governance. All these things are positive. All this strengthens Ethereum's value commitment—or commitment to its values, of course—which strengthens, like I said before, the value proposition that it's bringing to the market as a decentralized ecosystem solution that people can credibly trust.

I think all this is very bullish. There's a lot of people who've written a lot about ETH Labs, specifically this new organization that's been formed. A lot of the people who left the Ethereum Foundation are now in this organization, and this organization seems to be much more aligned towards getting institutional adoption—or just adoption in general—of Ethereum, of applications on Ethereum, and of ETH, the asset.

Haseeb of Dragonfly Capital is participating in helping ETH Labs, but he said, “Yes, this is the number go up,” and it seems like we're finally going to have a strategy not just for the success of Ethereum the network, but for the success of Ethereum the asset. So all these things are very bullish, I think. They show organized commitment towards shared outcomes and goals from across the players in the landscape.

BitMine and SharpLink are 2 of the leaders of this. Between them, they have, I think, around 7% of Ethereum's total supply, and they're generating somewhere around $400 million to $500 million a year of staking rewards. This is a move by them to begin to use some of that capital to invest in the continued proliferation, governance, healthy growth, and maintenance of the Ethereum ecosystem and the asset.

That's leadership and commitment from the highest levels of the financial allocators to the Ethereum ecosystem, as well as from the researchers, the talent, the technical developers, and so forth. Overall, I don't think there's any way you could look at this where it comes out as a net negative. This is one of the most bullish moments we've seen in Ethereum's recent history.

I'm really excited for this organization. I'd love to do whatever I can to be a supportive member of the community and of the ecosystem while they try to go out and make an impact and really start to move the needle here for ETH and for Ethereum. I just think this is one of the most bullish things I've seen.

The thing I love about this, too—and I said this to David—is that anytime you have competing objectives and multiple participants with different priorities, you're always going to have a bit of a gulf between what the normative ideal version of whatever ecosystem you're in is and where you are today. Ethereum has shown and demonstrated time and time again that it's been willing to adapt and to move from the present state to the normative state, and to continue to improve, continue to adapt, continue to grow, and deliver what the market and what the ecosystem participants are saying that they want from ETH and from Ethereum.

We switched from proof of work to proof of stake. We've brought in the L2s for scaling. Then we've changed a lot of the things around how that L2 ecosystem is functioning. We're bringing in the Ethereum economic zones. We're bringing in base rollups for the L1. We're bringing in privacy.

There are just so many things that are happening: Dencun, Pectra, Fusaka, Glamsterdam, and then Hegotá after that. There are all these updates that are coming to Ethereum, not just in how we're allocating resources in the ecosystem itself and within entities that are nodes among the nodes of governance of ETH, but we're upgrading the network. We're upgrading everything.

It just shows responsiveness to the demands and needs of the ecosystem, which I think is exactly what you want to see for Ethereum to remain healthy and to continue to lead in this market. I just think it's one of the most bullish things we've seen in a long time, and I'm really excited about it.

10. Why decentralized AI makes the case for Ethereum

John, in your most recent piece, there's a section called “Situational Awareness.” I think you make reference to Leopold Aschenbrenner, the guy who, I think, was formerly with OpenAI. In that piece, too, he talks about the kind of impending government regulation in AI. It's happening; it will happen. It's kind of a known thing.

We saw Fable release, and then we saw it being taken away from people. I think people in the US still have access to Fable, but the rest of the world does not. We saw it sort of break into, I think, NSA security systems in the brief time that it was out.

I've heard about this decentralized AI movement being huge in crypto. This convergence of crypto and AI was a huge VC narrative a few years ago. A lot of investment capital went into this. There's signal there, but I feel like it wasn't really at the point that it was needed, and I think those systems needed to build upon themselves. They weren't ready yet.

Just like ZK had a lot of VC capital go into it, we're now seeing the fruits of all that investment with ZK. I think the same sort of thing happened with this crypto-AI investment cycle. The point I'm getting at is that you're starting to see the need for decentralized AI. You're starting to see the escape valve that's needed for what's going to happen with AI and how much it's going to be censored, and how much it already is censored.

In your most recent piece, I think you mention this segment where Eric Voorhees talks about why he built Venice on Ethereum, which is the obvious choice. I would love to hear your thoughts on where you think this is going. It feels like we're getting close to a critical junction in my mind.

Again, wartime Ethereum—this is kind of the moment when the “then they fight you” stage is happening. I think we're going to need all this that we've been talking about. We talk about decentralization, and people make fun of us for it, but I really think we need it now. Where do you land on this?

A lot of people, I think, want to take this back to what happened when Russia started this war with Ukraine, because the United States government had a power that everyone was sort of aware that they had, but they hadn't used it. Once they used it, they showed not only a capacity to use it, but a willingness. That really changed a lot of things for a lot of people.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States government kicked Russia off the SWIFT system and basically froze a bunch of Russian assets and took possession of them because they could, and because they didn't like what Russia was doing. They had the ability to sanction them and freeze those assets, so they used it.

That made a lot of people in the international community uncomfortable with the dollar system, with holding things that the United States had the ability to freeze at its will at any time, because it had demonstrated a capacity that everybody had known about for a long time. Because it had never used it, it had never really become such a salient issue before.

Once that happened, you saw BRICS start to move towards mBridge and globally move away from dollar-denominated assets and towards gold-denominated assets. We saw this huge bull run in gold. I think some of that has been overplayed a little bit. I think the dollar is still quite dominant, and I think a lot of people are still very committed to that system.

That's kind of what we saw happen in this situation with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral: the government has always had this tacit ability, if it wanted to, to enforce KYC regulations on these technologies or to nationalize these technologies or these companies, and it had never really done that yet.

But Leopold, as you said, in his “Situational Awareness” article—which is about a 165-page treatise on how he thinks all this is going to play out as far as artificial intelligence is concerned—does say that he thinks AGI will get to a place where it is so strong and so capable that it will not be allowed to remain in the hands of public companies or on the open markets. It will become nationalized and guarded tightly for reasons of national security.

That might be the direction that we're moving in. What I've seen people saying is that open-source models are lagging behind frontier models in terms of capacity and capabilities. It's somewhere around a 6-month window. That can obviously change a great deal, but Mistral is just now coming to markets. In 6 months from now, we should see open-source models get to about where that is.

That means that this is all allegedly, by the way, because the NSA hasn't admitted to anything being hacked.

This is something I like a lot. Everyone’s pointing out all these hacks we’ve seen in DeFi. You see those because they’re public-facing and publicly known, but there’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes right now where people are using artificial intelligence and agent swarms to hack things that just get covered up, and you never hear about it. You don’t know about it, but there’s a lot going on that’s keeping people up all night.

I thought that was worth saying. Anyway, where all this is going is that now that the United States government has shown a willingness to put export controls on its frontier artificial intelligence models, everybody is realizing that open source might be something that’s really important to have. If you’re trying to build your business on something and the U.S. government can just take it away from you with a decree, that’s not really a secure business model.

That again gets to this issue of faith, security, stability, and open censorship resistance, right? All these CROPS things. To me, it was less about whether or not artificial intelligence is going to become open source, which I think it has and it will. There will continue to be an open-source solution for artificial intelligence, but it just highlights why these things are so important, why CROPS is so important, and why the market and major players like Microsoft are starting to realize that we do need something that’s censorship-resistant, open, permissionless, secure, and scalable.

I think that really makes the thesis on Ethereum as an asset, as an ecosystem, and as a network really clear and throws that into stark relief. That’s why I wrote about that. That’s why I called the essay “Wartime Ethereum: Situational Awareness,” because a lot of people are not seeing all these changes from governments—all these things that are happening that are sort of clamping down on people’s freedom and liberty.

When they’re forced, because of fear, to clamp down on things, that’s when you’re going to see people really start to scurry like rats from a sinking ship, looking for a safe haven, looking for a credible alternative, as I said in the essay: a trustless state, which is what Ethereum is building, right? An ecosystem, not a dictatorship.

That, I think, is one of the long-term call options that owning Ethereum and participating in Ethereum gives you if you’re building in this credibly neutral environment now or if you’re investing in it now. That’s something really important about this, and that’s what it highlighted for me.

It’s very easy to just get used to this. It’s like a fish in water: it’s always been this way, and it’ll always be this way. The dollar’s never going away. We’ll never have to go to an open-source solution. Yet once you see a move like this, like the United States kicking Russia off the SWIFT system or putting an export ban on Anthropic’s Fable 5, then you start to realize that there is actually a need for an alternative here. Major corporations and nation-states are going to start having that realization, as well as individuals.

We’ll see how things play out, but I thought that was really important. Avichal articulated why Ethereum is so valuable in an environment where people lose trust in people who have the capacity to use power but haven't used it. Eric Voorhees said that’s a practical application of why Ethereum’s CROPS values are so important: once you come to a place where you think, “Okay, I do need an alternative. I have to get out of this legacy system,” Ethereum is at the top of the pile as the first choice if you’re building decentralized AI, technology, finance, or whatever it might be.

There are going to be a lot of people looking, and Ethereum is going to be the best positioned to capture that market share as people start to leave these legacy systems and look for a better one.

But I do want to say this, too. Sergey Nazarov did a keynote at Consensus where he said, “We’re transitioning the world from systems of trust to systems of truth.” But that doesn’t happen without a little bit of wartime, right? You have to go out and say, “No, you should leave these systems. Don’t re-engineer another one that’s just the same corrupt system—systems of trust and ‘trust me, bros’ all the way down—and just stay in this fiat doom loop forever.”

You have to try to show people a better way, ask them to come to these open ecosystems and public blockchain ecosystems, and incentivize them to do so. Otherwise, they’ll just stay there forever. I think that’s a process that has to happen, too. It’s not just saying, “If we build it, they will come.” This is again what I think ETH Labs is for: going out and evangelizing, showing the value and why it’s so important, making it matter to people’s bottom lines, and demonstrating that value so they see the incentives and respond.

11. DeFi attracts those who question the rules of society

I think one of the hardest parts of translating all of the value of digital assets and trying to communicate why Ethereum is so important as a network—and what the use of ETH is—goes back to the fact that a lot of people live in a world where they just accept the rules and society around them as truth.

I think our industry tends to attract people who start to recognize, “I’m in a game, and someone made up these rules. Quite a few of these rules don’t make sense, and it looks like they’re changing the rules as they go. In fact, it looks like they’re changing the rules to their own benefit, and it’s not benefiting the majority of us.”

Growing up in the United States, I’m close to 40 years old, so I grew up in an amazing era—the ’80s and ’90s. Being in middle-class America was wonderful. I would argue that the spending power of the dollar was amazing at that time. It really was relatively inexpensive to live a very high-quality life at that point.

Where I grew up in the Midwest, it seemed like we were all living a pretty similar life. There wasn’t a big range between the haves and the have-nots. Today, I think people are finally starting to understand, especially United States citizens who depend on the dollar, what inflation is and how painful it actually is. It really can destroy your way of life if you’re not invested in the right assets and able to ultimately own a home instead of having to continue to rent and pay higher and higher prices.

12. How to value ETH: Triple point asset framework explained

If you’ve gotten to this point in the podcast, I’m sure you’ve got a real understanding of philosophically why all of this is important—what the promise is of having a source of truth, with Ethereum being the world ledger.

I’d like to close out on this: How do you think about valuing ETH? Again, I feel like you’ve really articulated the why behind digital assets, and specifically why Ethereum is so important, but it comes back to this very important question for investors who are impatient—or actually, that’s insulting to anyone who’s been around for a long time. Many, many folks have been patient, but they want to see this play out. They want to see ETH, the asset, accrue value.

What do you talk about with your colleagues about how you value ETH, the asset?

I think there are a lot of ways to ascribe value to ETH and a lot of things that drive value to it. I think the first thing is that it is a store of value. David Hoffman wrote a great piece on this, “Ethereum Is a Triple-Point Asset.”

It’s a consumable asset. You have to use the asset and burn the asset to conduct business on the Ethereum network. If you want to transact on Ethereum, you need to have ETH to do that. It is a store of value because it is a monetary asset of an economy. It has an intrinsic monetary premium ascribed to it, and that’s borne out in the market pricing of the asset.

It’s also a capital asset because there are a lot of DeFi activities that you can do on Ethereum and a lot of economic activities you can do on Ethereum. Ethereum itself becomes a capital asset. There are these 3 different things, right? It’s a transactional thing, a consumable asset, a currency asset, a capital asset, and a store-of-value asset—a monetary asset.

There are all these different things in the economy of the Ethereum ecosystem that drive value to it, and some of them lead at times versus others. Some of them drag it at times versus others. Some of the recent updates we’ve seen go through have increased the scalability and throughput of Ethereum and unlocked a lot of new users and use cases, but they’ve also put a little bit of slack in the rope on Ethereum’s burn mechanism.

There are a lot of different things that drive value to ETH. I don’t think it’s fair to say that it comes from only one, or that one matters more than the other. They all drive value together. They’re all symptoms of this underlying ecosystem that we have, which drives value to the monetary asset of the ecosystem. I think that as this grows, you’re going to see that continue to grow.

Like I said before, Ethereum’s commitment to CROPS makes it an impressive and distinct value offering on the market. There are going to be a lot of assets looking for ways to tokenize and improve on the legacy systems they had.

They are going to be attracted to Ethereum for that reason. A lot of capital—trillions, hundreds of trillions of dollars of capital—is going to come into the EVM ecosystem or onto the ETH layer 1. That is going to bring a huge wave of users who are going to come to Ethereum to get access to the capital, these better systems, better rates, better returns, and a better user experience: more secure, more scalable, and more efficient.

Then there’s also the rise of the agentic economy, which is coming. We’re going to see a trillion-plus new economic participants who never sleep, never eat, and are only here to make money as efficiently as they can coming into the landscape and looking for ways to generate economic value. They’re going to leverage a lot of Ethereum or EVM ecosystem tools to do that.

13. John's outlook for ETH price

As these assets come into ETH and into Ethereum, that is going to be attractive not only to human participants but to nonhuman, agentic operators and agents as well. All of this is a sort of virtuous cycle that feeds back on itself. That’s a healthy, functioning ecosystem economy and economic asset—a monetary asset—which is ETH, Ethereum.

Depending on who you ask about this, you can get all kinds of valuations. If you value ETH just on its layer 1 transaction fees, it should be worth $30 or something, right? But Bitcoin is not valued that way, right? Bitcoin is just a store of value. It doesn’t have a lot of the other value drivers that Ethereum does, for example.

But it is serving that to the market in a really great example of product-market fit, which is why there’s such a high monetary premium assigned to Bitcoin and gold, right? There’s also one assigned to Ethereum. I think that will continue to appreciate.

I did an interview with Jeff Kendrick on my channel, and he says Ethereum is going to be $40,000 by 2030. I’ve heard that from other people, too. Directionally, I’m not really hung up on a price prediction. I think you’re going to see Ethereum resolve in the relatively near term somewhere above $5,000. I’m not saying that’s going to happen, but that’s just what I’m expecting based on the history, the chart, and what I’m seeing happen in the markets.

I don’t know what to expect in terms of a price prediction, but I think all these things are driving value to ETH. Directionally, that should carry it higher. I’m content to stay patient and watch as this plays out.

If I agreed with David—if I thought that it was already done, if the thesis had already played out, tokenization, the agentic economy, and stablecoin adoption had already happened, and Ethereum had lost all that market share to other competitors—then I would have a different view of this.

But while we’re still seeing stablecoin adoption just beginning to take off, while we’re seeing tokenization of real-world assets just beginning to take off, and while we’re seeing the agentic economy just beginning to get into the first innings of its creation, I think there’s a lot of reason to think that Ethereum dominates in all of those as this goes forward, and that benefits ETH the asset.

I probably shouldn’t have used a specific price target in there, but I just think directionally higher is good enough for me right now. Much higher is also how I feel, too. I think there are a lot of reasons to say that is the most likely outcome here, so I’m staying patient with that.

Same here. I tend to focus on directionally where we’re headed long term and whether the drivers to increased demand for using Ethereum—the network, a reliance on the network—are there. Again, not to take it back to a fees argument. It’s more about how much value can ultimately rely on Ethereum, the network.

The best part of that story right now is stablecoins. That’s probably the easiest one to tell, but broader than stablecoins, stablecoins fall under this umbrella of RWAs. That story around tokenization—I give your old boss, Larry Fink at BlackRock, all the credit for taking that mainstream.

It was shocking to see someone in his position really grapple with understanding that, especially as someone who, I think, looked down upon this many years ago and saw it all as a tinkering, experimental type of space that really wasn’t going to ever become real technology for traditional finance to adopt.

It’s been really exciting to watch, and again, those drivers for demand are just huge, in my opinion. If you can understand why demand will continue to increase there, I think you can start to wrap your head around why we all believe that directionally, ETH has much higher to go in terms of its price.

14. Closing

John, I think this is a great place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much for joining us. I want to give you the final word. Any other final thoughts for us before you go?

Thanks so much again for having me here. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Just thanks again for having me. Thank you all for listening, and it was a pleasure to be here.