The post What is ETH worth? – Blockworks appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. In 2017, investor John Pfeffer published “An (Institutional) Investor’s Take on Cryptoassets,” a seminal paper on long-term investments of crypto tokens. In retrospect, Pfeffer’s original thesis was way ahead of its time. It laid the formative groundwork for investor thinking around magic internet money, and made many prescient predictions that still hold up today. Pfeffer argued that the equilibrium long-term outcome would be one dominant crypto asset as a monetary store of value, with bitcoin as the likely candidate. He projected BTC’s market cap within a range of $4.7 to $14.6 trillion ($260k-$800k per BTC). There are many reasons Pfeffer believes bitcoin would be cemented as the dominant SOV, but key to the thesis is that BTC carries the least technological risk. For ETH to beat BTC at the SOV game requires massive intellectual coordination across a multiyear roadmap with lots of technical upgrades subject to delays and/or risk of failures. As Hasu put it on an old Uncommon Core podcast, “nothing happening in bitcoin is actually the best thing that can happen to bitcoin.” Turning to Ethereum, ETH bulls today tend to argue the superiority of ETH to BTC on a multi-prong level: Its use as a means of payment within the EVM ecosystem buttresses its value as a SOV (on top of its deflationary effects following EIP-1559). But it’s not clear why that alone would make ETH a valuable SOV. Pfeffer argued that crypto participants would simply convert their preferred “store of value via the payment rail at the time of payment in the exact amount needed and for as little time as possible.” He likened this to retailers converting bank deposits to physical cash for payments only at times of need. Pfeffer also presciently…

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Filed under: News - @ January 6, 2025 6:26 pm