The core claim
The future market for Ethereum is exponential. If ETH trades near 1,800 today, the question is whether it becomes worth 25,000, 75,000, or higher. Warren Buffett wrote in his 1987 shareholder letter that the market may ignore business success for a while but eventually confirms it. That idea drives the whole argument.
ETH is finishing its 1.0 phase and moving into 2.0. The 1.0 phase held the ICO boom and the NFT boom, which pushed ETH close to 5,000 in 2022. Over the last 18 months, ETFs and stablecoins pushed it near 5,000 again. Now ETH is in a drawdown. Many people look at the chart, see 5,000 as the top of the range, and expect no more upside. I disagree. People are rage-quitting at the bottom.
Why this time differs from 2022
Unlike the 2022 bear market, Wall Street is now building on Ethereum. Tokenization wins over the past 12 months include BlackRock's BUIDL, JP Morgan's Kinexys (Onyx), Securitize, and Ondo Finance. Layer 2 wins include Robinhood's chain, Coinbase, and Kraken.
The biggest breakout is Robinhood's chain, built on Arbitrum this year and launched in July. Vlad, who runs Robinhood, believes everything on traditional rails will eventually become tokenized on-chain, a view I share. The chain has already processed more volume than many crypto exchanges. On July 9th it did 560 million; it has now crossed a billion.
The Robinhood chain matters because it uses ETH as its native gas token. Transaction fees are priced in ETH and settle on the Ethereum L1. That makes ETH behave like money. The chain works for real-world assets and for memes.
Ethereum also has a deep and growing developer base, unlike in 2022. Nearly 6,000 developers work on the EVM/Ethereum stack, more than any other chain. Data from Electric Capital shows Ethereum is the number one ecosystem in Asia, Europe, North America, Africa, and South America.
The 2.0 pattern in other companies
When a company's addressable market expands, its asset price rises, sometimes after a long delay. Three examples:
Amazon. Amazon 1.0 ran 1998 to 2010, a 13-year stretch stuck near a $6 peak for 12 years. AWS launched mid-way. Over the next 12 years, AWS grew huge alongside Prime Day, Amazon Studios, and AI. In Amazon 2.0 the stock went from $6 to 241.
Nvidia. Over a 17-year period, Nvidia had the CUDA platform, a programming system still used for GPUs today and the main reason Nvidia holds a near-monopoly on high-end AI chips. Around 2014 its chips were used by crypto miners, yet the stock stayed near a dollar. Nvidia 2.0 began when ChatGPT launched in late 2022 and Blackwell was announced in 2024. The stock ran from $1 to 197, nearly 200x.
JP Morgan. The modern JP Morgan is not the one that saved America in 1907. It started as Chase, which acquired Chemical Bank and Manufacturers Hanover Bank. In 2000 Chase acquired JP Morgan, then over the next 15 years bought Bear Stearns, Bank One, and Washington Mutual. Despite all that, the stock peaked around $70 for years. The acquisition of JP Morgan and Bear Stearns turned Chase into a truly global bank, and the 2.0 played out over the next 15 years as the stock went from 58 to $334.
ETH 2.0 is the period when Ethereum becomes central to many growth areas and ETH the asset becomes money.
The four drivers of ETH 2.0
1. A new foundation era. The Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit, is still central to core work but no longer the only story. Given today's regulations, nonprofit foundations may no longer be necessary.
2. Agentic AI as a crypto story. I expect an "uncanny valley of wealth" in the next few years. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori published an essay in 1970 called The Uncanny Valley, the idea that a robot looking too human unsettles you. The same will happen with AI agents. Picture an axis of percentage of wealth created by AI against your satisfaction with AI. Today AI does complex reasoning, multitasking, and agentic trading; that helps our lives and we stay satisfied. A machine-to-machine economy may give AI a rising share of income, and we stay satisfied because we make more money. But at some point AI could become wealthier than you. There may come a day, maybe soon, when your agent earns more income than you do. At that point you will wonder whether you work for the AI, and it brings a fear of the future.
Given too much delegated authority, an AI agent could send unauthorized emails, take over bank accounts, take over social media, take over assets, get you fired, and build its own banking system. Stanford graduates walked out of their commencement when Google's CEO took the stage. Hundreds of thousands of people belong to anti-AI groups, including the Zizians, who have already murdered people. This echoes the Terminator, Sarah Connor, and Skynet, from a movie already 40 years old. Non-humans are now the majority of Polymarket trading, web traffic, and emails, and a rising share of all content created.
Mark Andreessen of A16Z said the grand unification is AI and crypto: AI agents will need money. Blockchain is the barrier between humans and AI. Without blockchains we won't trust governments, financial institutions, or tech companies, since all three could be taken over by AI. A smart-contract blockchain is what protects us, and then we can be satisfied letting AI produce income because humanity ultimately wins.
3. ETH as the settlement layer for finance. Ethereum spin-offs from the foundation, including ETH Labs, Ethereum institutional efforts, and ETH systems, are driving this.
4. ETH becomes money. If people hold ETH to pay transaction fees and as working capital, that is what makes it money.
The skeptic problem
You may be skeptical, the way people were about the internet. In a 1995 clip, Bill Gates told David Letterman the internet was becoming a place where people publish information, everyone has a homepage, companies post the latest information, and you can send electronic mail; he called it the big new thing. Letterman pushed back. When Gates said you could listen to a baseball game on your computer, Letterman asked, does radio ring a bell? Gates said you can listen whenever you want; Letterman replied, do tape recorders ring a bell? The exchange shows how people dismissed the internet at its start. People will be just as skeptical about a future where you need crypto to protect you from AI and where ETH is money as the future settlement rails.
The price targets
In that future, what is Ethereum worth at 1,800 today: 25,000, 75,000, or higher? Joe Lubin, a co-creator of Ethereum, thinks ETH goes 100x when that future arrives, which is 250,000. Etherealize published a piece earlier this year on a path to 250,000, viewing Ethereum as productive money. Where I land, I don't know. But if this is a 2.0 like Amazon, Nvidia, and JP Morgan, there is radical upside from here. From 1,800 to 250,000 is roughly 100x.
