The case for Ethereum's growth in 2025
18 Dec 2024 · 42:05
Milk Road head of research Kyle Reidhead tells host Jay Hamilton why he expects Ethereum to outperform in 2025 despite a weak year against Bitcoin and Solana. He asks who the next buyer is, pointing to Ether ETF inflows, institutions and a long list of companies building on Ethereum, from BlackRock and Franklin Templeton to PayPal, Sony and Visa. He argues that mainstream users will reach crypto through existing apps, and that Ether and Bitcoin will draw down less than other assets.
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GM good morning welcome to the milroad show The Daily crypto show where our insights hit harder than the moment you realize you were on mute the whole time I'm your host Jay Hamilton and today we're joined by Kyle rehead to talk all about ethereum ethereum has had a bumpy year is this the time to sell or is this the time to buy why has ethereum been lagging so much is there still a bright future what are our price predictions for 2025 these are all the questions we're going to be answering today before we jump in today is your last chance to vote on the milk Road Awards and if you vote you get one month free of milk Road Pro for new subscribers only so click the link in the show notes or hit the QR
code on the screen to go vote for which is the best blockchain of the year the best meme coin of the year and many other Awards before we jump in and hear from kle we need to take a moment to hear from our sponsors who make the show possible meanwhile is the world's first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy they do everything in BTC you pay in BTC they pay claims to your family in BTC you take out policy loans entirely in BTC when you need liquidity protect your family from life's uncertainty and a broken Financial system build intergenerational Bitcoin wealth while the cost of living skyrockets in dollar terms plus get all the tax and legal benefits of life insurance now in Bitcoin visit
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for eth it's has not performed as well I can bring up on screen here the year-to day performance of Soul BTC and eth these are the three Majors We compare them all the time and soul up 150% on the year Bitcoin 130% and eth only up 7 6% this year I know it's not enough Kai I know you're laughing because you're like 76% is amazing6 but what the other two majors and this is the comparison it's an easy comparison to make people get worried a lot of people are feeling like eth is you know is it dead I that might be an extremes take what what happened to eth this year what's what's going on
here yeah so this year is very similar to 2020 of last cycle when you look at kind of the cycle comparisons and typically in the year before the big part The Big Year of the bull market where things get crazy Bitcoin dominates this has happened for multiple Cycles not just last cycle 2020 but it was also true in 20 was it 16 um and it's the end of this year slash moving into next year at least historically where Bitcoin dominance sort of Peaks and all of a sudden ethereum or other altcoins start to really Dominate and take off and I feel like we're on track for the exact same thing to happen um I don't
know for sure but it looks like Bitcoin dominance I'll just bring up a chart here but it kind of looks to me anyway that Bitcoin dominance has probably topped out right and I have it here up on the screen and you can see um you know we've had a big dip in Bitcoin dominance now we've had a bit of like a reversal over the last like couple what is this weeks I guess two weeks um but I mean we topped out at around 62% at least what it shows in trading and we're sitting at 57.7 3% now so it kind of looks like Bitcoin dominance has topped out this also to uh topped out in um around the same time on the previous cycle uh and again every time this happens we move into you know altcoin Season which is when ethereum and other alts start to to outperform uh this
isn't the first time this has happened again this has happened three time or two other times previously I think this is the third time it happens um and when we look at eth BTC at the same time that Bitcoin dominance has topped out of course it looks maybe that ethereum has also uh the eth BTC chart has also bottomed out now I don't know for sure you never know what this I've said that a million times but when we look at the long-term sort of trend here it looks like it's the case now um people say eth is dead because I think a lot of people know Bitcoin tends to dominate in the early years of the bull market uh but then Al it's kind of doe afterwards but we've also had salana and salana has really dominated for the last two years as well
right and so people are kind of saying well maybe it's different this cycle like it doesn't seem like it was just Bitcoin because you all said salana and I guess salana meme coins which really took off as well um and I think people kind of forget that even last cycle you had defi summer where you had a bunch of altcoins that had the narrative that were kind of the IT thing that did really take off even early on in the cycle before ethereum really started to dominate so in terms of just like timing historical Trends I feel everything's on track I'm not too worried about anything there the other thing I think is just like Solana was so undervalued and got so rocked because of FTX and what happened there that it needed to it was obvious that that thing was going to come back I mean we were screaming to
buy this thing in 2023 in fact and of course it was going to continue to dominate and I think it still is probably going to outperform ethereum um because it's still what one quarter or something of ethereum's market cap somewhere around there anyway so um yeah I mean I'm not too worried now what happened was price dictates narrative right it's not the other way around and so what happened is salon has dominated Bitcoin has dominant as it always does and of course it's got narratives because of that last cycle in 2020 right at the very end at the very bottom of it there was an eth death party and it was when again eth Bitcoin was going low low low low low we thought when the heck when's this thing going to turn around someone had a spaces and there was a bunch of Bitcoin Maxis that came in
there actually had a party that this was you know e death and then it literally marked the very bottom to the day and eth just absolutely ripped in like 5x Bitcoin after that in a number of months now will that happen again I don't know but there has been a lot of eth death parties once again uh and then also like sana's narrative has gotten big so it's got a lot of Mind share on Twitter U because again its price has gone up like 10x at some point that's going to slow down right uh things don't just go up for forever and I know people like to think that and the moment that you know um you know ethereum starts to dominate people are going to start to say the same thing even now salana has been kind of struggling the last like what three
weeks and I see a bunch of tweets of like Soul's dead and it's like guys no it's not none of the stuff is dead and especially if you look at the fundamentals of ethereum to me and I know there are mixed takes on this on Twitter let's call it and maybe even on YouTube and stuff as well but to me the fundamentals could not be stronger could not be better for ethereum and so I remain extremely extremely bullish do I think Sal get outform salana this cycle no probably not salana is much smaller do I think a lot of Al altcoins outperform eth this cycle absolutely but risk reward I don't know that there's much better out there than ethereum at this stage in the cycle uh and so still extremely bullish on ethereum and fundamentally it couldn't be more bullish right now yeah and we're going
to get into those fundamentals a little bit later in the show because I do think they are super important uh but before we get there the I could I I so I follow you on the salana it was down bad because of FTX had to make a comeback makes total sense follow you on bitcoin Bitcoin always leads to cycles that also makes total sense I think where a lot of people struggle is okay and then even I can the meme coins had an incredible 2024 different different narrative more risk way more risky different part of of investors so I don't even necessarily think we need to get in that where I really struggle though is and where I think a lot of people struggle is okay but then we've seen soie up 8X since the summer we've
seen xrp rip 5x in the last six weeks let's say a bunch of Dino coins are up big time and eth is still lagging what do what do you say to that I mean if you look at the last month eth is not lagging it's actually outperforming both salana and Bitcoin so in the last month we've seen eth do what we thought it was going to do so again if we're looking at the full year of 2024 yeah it's definitely lag there's no denying that um but in the last month which is again since kind of we think things are switching and Bitcoin dominance is topped out eth is outperforming both salon and Bitcoin so I don't really see that now sui was like a 10 billion fdv um token earlier this year just a few months ago of course
that thing's going to outperform ethereum uh same with even some of these like Dino tokens that have just like no one has bought them in three years right they literally have not moved and so of course when retail comes back people were going to buy them they're going to all have their moment will they have sustained growth throughout the cycle I mean they never have previously so like probably not whereas ethereum I think will um but but we'll see but either way like again there's going to be all over the market in every other asset right and again suie could be that next trade it's the the salana of last cycle is what at least I think it is and I know a lot of people are kind of deeming it uh and so you got to remember even last CLE ethereum did amazing it dominated
Bitcoin it went you know all the way to what five close to 5,000 but we had the teral Luna we had the Avalanche and we had salana and we had BNB that all absolutely rocked as well and polygon right we're the five big like l1s that really did well last cycle and they outperformed eth now they all got rocked 99% in the bare Market whereas eth only went down like 70% right so if you held eth longer you actually did much better right now a lot of them have come back so again what's going to happen this cycle you're probably not going to time the very top and so you got to think risk reward right yes suie probably outperforms uh salana this cycle and salana probably outperforms eth this cycle but do you want to put all of your bags into that like probably not because
you don't know when the top is going to be and the last thing you want to do is holding some of these smaller tokens that don't really have the the fundamental metrics behind it when the bare Market hits because that's when prices drop 70 80% in like two days and you don't have a lot of time to get out and so that really scares me and so again put some of your bags in there without a doubt I think a lot of these things are going to be amazing Technologies but um for me it's all about risk reward and if I'm going to put the large basket of my capital in I want to put in something I think is going to make it long term here well and let's not forget that uh most crypto investors have large bags in eth it's evidenced by the fact that a whenever we
produce content around eth we get a lot of a lot of viewers but also eth got the second largest market cap in the space it is a massive asset which a lot of people own so a lot of people are invested in okay I want to chat about um what's going to move eth's price moving forward and what do you expect to happen as we either the rest of this year or more likely as we go into 2025 yeah one of the main things you got to think of when you buy an token is who's going to be the next buyer who's going to buy my token that's going to take it from this price to the next price right we know who's bought it previously there's OG's and Bitcoin they've bought the Bitcoin there's OG's and eth they've bought the eth who's next up to buy it and look is retail
goingon to buy eth maybe probably not you know not this cycle anyway because they're going to come back and they're going to buy I don't know AI stuff and meme coins and I mean they've been buying soul and they've been buying xrp and whatever else um they'll probably end up buying eth if it has its moment right and it starts to outperform they're going to buy it because retail that's what they do but you got to think is who's the big large buyer that comes in and what I look at is ETFs ETFs to me are the most obvious trade you can possibly do in this space right now it's why Bitcoin has done so extremely well this year and it's why I think ethereum will continue to do uh will will start to really do well next year as I said it's outperformed in the last like let's
say 30 days or so and why is that it's because it had so much inflows uh into the ETFs in the last like three weeks it's been absolutely crazy if we look at some of the numbers here um we just look in the last like let's see I'm looking at maybe two weeks here like we're in in two billion plus of inflows on ethereum ETFs it's pretty wild what's going on black rock is bring is buying like a 100 it's not Black Rock but black Rock's customers are buying like 100 to 200 million eth every single day you know it's been absolutely Next Level and I think that that does not stop and I think that actually accelerates moving into next year when more institutions and more funds are actually able and get the green light to buy crypto ETFs
remember e ETF only came in like was it may or something like that or June whenever it was like live and so like it's got to go through a lot of approval process so does Bitcoin for that matter and so um when I think of what happens next year A lot of people are going to want to get exposure to crypto a lot of Institutions a lot of funds most of them still even with Trump in are not going to be able to buy actual liquid crypto like real crypto right they're only going to be able to get access to to it through ETFs Mo or or through like the equities which could be coinbase micr strategy Etc and so you got to think where is that Capital coming from the funds are going to want this stuff and they're going to buy the ETFs and there's no
other ETFs yet now I understand xrp and salana and I don't know maybe Doge or whatever harar are going to get an ETF eventually but it's not going to happen immediately and it's definitely not going to happen when Trump comes in because there are still lawsuits on most of these things and it takes months for those to first get shut down right so Trump has to come in the new SEC chair has to come in then it takes months to actually get those lawsuits dropped then they can start to apply and go through approval process so for me I'm actually not even sure any of those get approval in 2025 it might actually just be 2026 when they get approvals because there's just a lot of paperwork and admin stuff that has to go through now maybe Trump FES a way to like push it all through
faster but like I don't think that's the number one thing that he cares about I don't think that's like his main goal yes he's bullish crypto but I don't think he cares to like get har bar an xrp or whatever an ETF those will come because they will be a free market everyone will be allowed but like there's still a bit of a process that that has to come in here and like as the new SEC chair comes in he's still got a lot of work to do first right and so there's just a lot of things that need to happen before I think the rest of crypto gets it which means I really think ethereum gets a big lead here now Bitcoin obviously had this lead for a while and a lot of Institutions already are coming around to understanding Bitcoin there's a lot of companies
putting on their balance sheets there's talk about strategic Reserve so like they're focused on that and they've been buying that but once you buy Bitcoin the most common thing is well what's the rest of this crypto thing and they start to look at other assets and of course ethereum is the one they're going to look at because it's the only one they can actually buy right it's also the one where it has a the only one with a stamp of approval of Black Rock and Franklin Templeton and visa and PayPal and the list goes on and on and on and on and on and they're going to look at well who's the biggest crypto player in the space coinbase right at least in the it's the big public company in this space where are they well of course they are on ethereum they're building on
ethereum with base right Circle probably going to go public this year Kraken probably going to go public in the US in 2025 and they're going to look at where is most of usdc it's on ethereum where is Kraken building right now in the crypto space ethereum and so if the biggest and the best crypto companies in the entire world are using and building on ethereum what do you think the other funds institutions are going to do it's not hard guys it's very simple just look at what the biggest and the smartest are doing and you're probably going to have a a good bet here and so in terms of like where are the big companies building and where can the capital actually flow to it points to eth and so I I just think the setup for ethereum in 2025 is is huge okay so and and this is
what what I'm hearing a lot on the show is there's from all of the when I when I go to crypto Twitter it's eth death and then when when we get guests come on the show it's everybody's like I've never been so bullish on E and these are I mean more of the experts the investors who've been here for a long time who have seen this scen Cycles play out over and over again and so it just feels like a simple be be more patient right like a simple psychology issue you know why I think there's this mix it's because crypto Twitter is crypto Twitter is the people that have been in the space for a long time and they are actually using this stuff day in and day out and they
use it very differently than the way that the mainstream in the rest of the world is going to use it and so for a lot of people in crypto um or on crypto Twitter anyway they've been using eth for forever and then l2s came along and they've had to bridge their eth to base and then bridge to arbitrum and Bridge and it's a pain for these people right especially when you've used salon and it's so easy but for net new people who never had any assets on ethereum moving your your money from let's say your Apple pay or from your coinbase to bass or to arbitrum or to salana is identical there is no difference right you don't Bridge you don't need to deal with l2s and all this stuff that everyone else is complaining about none of that matters the fees on the theorum
L1 none of that matters that's just for the Nerds that were here in the beginning which are the people on crypto Twitter and so those people complain about the ux and the fragmentation the blah blah blah but that's because they've been trying to farm every airdrop that's ever existed and that's of course across 30 different l2s and all these different protocols blah blah blah blah but that's not how mainstream or institutions are using this stuff and so it's it's a whole different world when you look at crypto Twitter people who not only have a different ux than everyone else but also have begs in other smaller assets that they want to go up and so of course they bought salon at 20 it's 10x and they fell in love with it now right of course they did they fell in love with their meme coins
because they're 22y old kids that are just dinking around on crypto Twitter instead of you know paying attention to to being in school and so like they don't think rationally they just think based off their bags and so of course they're going to scream and say this thing's broken this thing's whatever and you have this tribalism of people who just like love the architecture of salana or love the architecture of SOI or love the ethos of Bitcoin and like that's all fine and dandy but in the end of the like at the end of the day that's like a 100,000 people on crypto Twitter that's it it's a small group who really care about these things deeply but that's not what the global markets the eight billion people in this world and the like trillions of capital in this world from institutions it's not what
they care about and it's not how they see this space like even just the nicest comparison if you look at the Etha um ETF chart so this is the the Black Rock eth ETF chart versus the eth chart okay the Etha ETF chart starts in June which basically means it started it went down just a little bit and it's been up and up ever since there's no Cycles right there's no up and downs and 70% draw downs and whatever but if you look at the eth chart there's these crazy crazy drw downs but if you think of like if you've ever boughten gold or uranium you buy it an ETF you don't go and you look at at what's the price of uranium since 1960 you look at what is it in my spra ETF thing and it looks quite bullish and so most of the world sees eth in a very
different lens than what crypto Twitter sees and has experienced eth and I think a lot of people can't wrap their heads around that or just forget to do that yeah it's a it's a really great Point okay let's let's extend out everybody everybody listening always wants to know what can I expect from eth in 2025 and for the rest of this cycle if you look out for 2025 what do you think is going to happen in terms of price action in terms of adoption or what do you mean specifically I mean in terms of price then then we'll get to adoption okay okay so I think that 2025 is gonna be really good for E really good for crypto in general um my prediction is probably somewhere around 10K um we
could definitely get up to 12 maybe maybe 15 but I don't I don't really think so but it's definitely possible um but I could see anywhere between 8 and 12K is the range that I'm going to give um and so from here what are we sitting at around 4K we're looking at at least a 2X maybe a 3X okay in the next let's go to for this cycle for this cycle for c yeah yeah uh okay let's let's talk about but also actually let me add to that I also don't think that this cycle in the back end of it where we go into a bare Market is going to be as aggressive or bad in terms of a downturn as we've seen in the past specifically for Bitcoin and eth specifically for Bitcoin and eth I don't know about the
rest we'll have to see how that plays out and what happens over 2025 do we get these ETFs is there even interest in ETFs because the other thing to remember is like even if we get a so ETF next year if we don't have a black rock or Fidelity soulle ETF then those ETFs are completely useless does not matter if you look at the numbers on Ethan Bitcoin they are 90% of all of the inflows maybe even higher than 90% And so if you don't get the stamp of approval from Black Rock from Fidelity for these ETFs then you can just like those are actually irrelevant if Black Rock gets us a sole ETF the game has changed and so I don't know what's going to play out there I I really don't know yet and so for me it's I see a clear picture for eth and
Bitcoin to have you know probably still a draw down do they have a big bare market for a year plus that they go down 70% or they used to be 90 I think no maybe it's 50 you know maybe it's even less at this point um I still think they have a draw down they have a pullback but I don't think it's anything like the rest of the industry right which is partly big reason why you like the trade so much because of the risk reward obviously and nobody knows when this cycle will end uh none of us have a crystal ball I'm I'm hearing as high as we've had uh others on the show who predict 15K even 20K for E do you think that's possible or do you think they're they're wishful thinking it's probably I mean it's possible Right like if if
ethereum really gets the adoption I think it could have I don't know if it's going to happen by next year um but like we'll talk about adoption why I think I'm so bullish on ethereum in terms of fundamentals but like ethereum is very different in Bitcoin in the sense that I think it's like 40 or 50% of ethereum is in smart contracts which means like it's not even available to be sold and then you have these e which is way different than Bitcoin like Bitcoin doesn't have any smart contracts for the most part it's got a tiny little bit in like I don't know the lightning network if that still exists but like not much now it's got obviously Bitcoin has a lot of OG holders and people that are just never going to sell it right micro strategy one of them Etc and a bunch of other
corporations like it has its own Supply crunch Dynamic but ethereum's is actually on another level if it really picks up adoption and starts burning eth a lot again plus all this eth gets Contin continued use and continued growth like it is now in smart contracts there's just not going to be a lot of eth available and so there is a point and there's a potential that eth really has a crazy Supply Crunch and it shoots to 20K now it doesn't sustain that of course but like it is definitely possible a lot needs to go right but like it's possible yeah yeah it it feels to me like this could be like we could look a year from now we could be looking back and we could be like whoa this was the year of eth that everybody thought was wrong and everybody the people that
were saying it the whole time that seemed like they were just eth Maxis were actually right and for a lot of reasons you got to remember you said a lot of people hold eth already in crypto but a lot of people actually moved that into Soul remember the last two years all the capital in any asset that has seen growth is just crypto natives redistributing their Capital it's not net new and so most of Sal's run from $8 up to 200 and whatever is just people who held eth or who hold maybe Bitcoin or who held whatever else and put it in Soul and so there is also a chance at some point if eth really catches a bid that that Capital moves back not all of it but some of it right and same with Bitcoin what typically happens here is
Bitcoin Capital moves into eth and that hasn't really started yet as according to the eth Bitcoin ratio so like there's still a lot of existing crypto Capital that could move into eth as well again not sure if it will but there's potential so things can get a bit crazy and again price dictates narrative so the moment that that price starts to move for ethereum watch crypto Toto turn like this all of a sudden everything else is dead and eth is going to be the darling l2s will be the best thing ever fragmentation gone like it's just going to be the best thing in the world and it's like what what happened here but it'll happen sure that's exactly what I think is by the way just quick side note every time you say eth from 8 or anybody says it from 8 to 250 all I do is think about
when you wrote a pro report and called buying Soul sorry not did I say eth I meant soul from eight to 250 uh and called told everyone to buy soul at $20 I think is what it was back a few years ago uh and yeah man deep out to you for that call because that certainly helped me and a lot of people uh on the pro side um okay let's let's talk about adoption so uh East vers salana is the the ongoing conversation of who's going to win the adoption race obviously the the chain that gets to a billion users first feels like it's going to have the moat To Go the Distance um what's your thesis on how adoption will play out yeah so I I think what matters the most
is Which smart contract blockchain gets the most usage okay where does all the capital go where do all the users go where does all the transactions go where do all the developers go right this is the thing that matters I don't really care too much about the burn I don't care much about fees um I don't care much about even ux at this point because there's a lot of reasons why that might not matter which I'll explain in a second um and so to me it's all about like how are people going to use blockchain and where are they going to use it right and so where I think I don't think we get the billion people in the way that we use crypto right now a billion people I promise you this are
not going to come download a metamask wallet or a phantom wallet connect in and find you know a URL from a Twitter account where you can get your cow swap or your Unis swap or whatever and then like sign these transactions to exchange their their ether their soul into whatever token like that is such a niche group of the world and yes we'll get a few more people that will do this but it's small and it will always be small and there's just 80 90% of the world will just never do it I don't care how clean you make this wallet Phantom or how fast you make this blockchain salana no one most people are not going to do that and so when I think about how are people going to actually use crypto it's
going to be when it's abstracted away and they don't know about it right or maybe they know about it but it doesn't matter much because they're just using their own app like PayPal or they're using their app like revolute or Robin Hood or even Twitter or whatever and it just sort of works within that they might know that it's crypto um but they're not going to go and get some separate different app and go through this whole or buy a different phone and go through this different ux okay so you got to understand that point right there small small niche in the way that we think and use crypto now so don't care about that that is irrelevant to me what I wonder is how do the next billion two billion three billion people come on and that means using existing apps and existing experiences that they already
use in their day-to-day world this is how the internet got adopted too was with existing brands that a lot of people already used and they sort of brought them on online right not all of them of course they were the early people that were playing around with Google before it was like a big thing but Walmarts and like the big companies that existed before the banks Etc they are the ones that helped a lot of the Boomers and the other people who weren't like Born Into the internet help them come and use the online world I think the same is true for the onchain world okay and so how does that play out well I think about what did coinbase do coinbase had this existing group of users okay around 10 million active users uh I think they've had 100 million in total like verified users but about
10 million active over the last like year or two years and they said we've got this ecosystem of people who like to trade you know crypto assets and invest and right now they don't do it on chain right even though we have a wallet called coinbase wallet and we have all this other stuff they still don't do it and they said what we're going to do is try to move all these people people from our our app over here and we're going to move them on chain right how do they do it well they launched their own chain right and then they built their own products and and and basically like invested in companies to build it under their brand and they made the ux from their existing app so seamless to go from coinbase app to base and they started having notifications in their
coinbase app to mve you over there they created incentives and they found a way to profit from that and generate Revenue beautiful business model for coinbase great user experience for the existing users that weren't already on chain and it's worked like a charm and who's following suit Kraken and then who else is doing this Sony right and Deutsche Bank is launching L to and all these other companies that are beginning to do this they see where this is going which is if these big companies with existing communities and existing users and I'm talking about users in the hundreds of millions right or tens of millions to hundreds of millions they it is much better for them to bring people on chain because their their operating costs go next to zero when you move on chain and
they have new business models and new ways to generate Revenue right and so companies are incentivized to bring their users on chain but not to just say hey go transact on chain Go download a metamask wallet it's they want to bring them on chain under their own user experience under their own ecosystem and they want to generate revenue from it like what coinbase has done in Kraken that Playbook is now there and it exists and okx is now doing as well and binance is doing it with B&B Etc and so soon I think probably in in in 2025 Robin Hood launches an L2 right and I think uh PayPal will eventually probably launch an L2 right and the list goes on of all these existing companies with existing users that will launch an L2 and bring
their users on chain okay that's where I think and they will do it where either they'll launch an L2 like what base did H or coinbase did and like they'll move them over or they will just start to launch experiences onchain experiences in their own app but they'll do it connecting into existing platforms or their own L2 so that they can generate revenues from it and control the user experience etc etc and so that to me is how I see billions of users coming on on chain not from like I'm going to go download a metamask wallet and in that world ethereum has already won that world right yes you can launch L2 on salana or maybe you can even do it on SOI I actually don't even know if that exist exists yet but the difference is there is no documentation in developer
tools and all these different things on salana to do that yet and so no one's going to do that but right now you can just hire a company there's many of them out there already to just go and launch an L2 for you and deploy it and keep updating it and handle it all you don't need to hire any devs they just do it for you so coinbase that didn't exist when coinbase launched del2 they did it in-house when Kraken launch is seld to they actually don't hire any devs to do it they just hired a company to do it that's how these big corporate companies can launch l2s without worrying about finding devs who actually know how to do this stuff you cannot do that that doesn't exist yet on any other blockchain so ethereum scaling road map was was exactly this let's create the
infrastructure for other companies around the world that already have users to launch their own chain without worrying about the details of launching a chain and I think that is going to play out as the winning um strategy to onboard billions of people so that's what makes me very bullish ethereum is they're the only ones with the setup for that right now yeah it's a really great point and and as you said it tracks so well with how internet adoption happened because there was so many people who were not on the internet until Walmart started selling their own products online and said hey our hundreds of millions of Walmart customers hey come now you can go buy your Walmart pants or whatever you're buying from Walmart
online and that's how it happened and that same thing is very likely to happen here I I gotta bring this up uh everybody listening if you guys have not seen ethereum adoption.org this site is amazing and it has a list of all the companies building on eth and look at these this is just from 2024 in 2024 Franklin Templeton Black Rock City Robin Hood Franklin Tu again buenus Airlines uh stripe Visa Christies PayPal Google venmo PayPal again Sony Fidelity Toyota Fox Corporation Deutsche Bank uh PayPal again Google again AWS like it's it's wild there is there is no other chain that is getting that level of Enterprise
level adoption but the thing is most of these things that are being that these all that are listed here aren't even in market yet right Sony isn't really even doing anything with their chain yet and we've been chatting with them about coming onto the show but we keep delaying it because they're they're they're still trying to figure out their plan but they're they're they know that they want to be there and is the place that they're going to be building so it feels like yeah really bullish signal yeah and look I know people are sitting here going yeah but the fragmentation of of you know the assets on on l2s sucks and you know switching from Network to network sucks and all that and I think um two things like one that won't be the ux for most people as I already said but two that's also getting fixed and I
think is going to be fixed very soon if you see what's happening with the super chain with arbitr orbit with plastic chain on ZK sync we are not going into a world where you have we will have thousands and thousands of l2s in my opinion um but they won't be just l2s like they are today they will be part of these bigger ecosystems like the super chain or the arbitrum orbit and those each one of those companies are working on fixing all the fragmentation and that's coming next year super chain I think um Ryan already talked about this when you had him on the podcast that like for example by next year Bas and optimism and a few others are all going to have this like interoperability and composability standard where it'll feel like it's just one chain it'll feel like it's just salana there's no selecting
different networks you don't need to bridge to like you know make you have assets on base and then you want to use some app on optimism you won't need to bridge that over and change your network in your and your wallet it'll all just work seamlessly just like it's salana and then in two three years or whatever it is probably the super chain and arbitrum orbit and the elastic chain and whatever else will all be um uh grouped together even more and now you can go from one equ system to the next and it's it's all the same and so you have salana over here as an execution layer trying to get apps and trying to get users but then you have like hundreds of l2s doing the same thing some of them already with massive amounts of users like coinbase and they are all playing the game
together and soon they're all going to be joined on one team and so you got one shot here for salana to figure it out and you've got hundreds of shots over here on ethereum and you don't need every one of these l2s to succeed you just need a few of them right and the moment that happens it's game over right again not game over I think son still going to exist and is going to be an important infrastructure here but I just think you've got so many chances for it to work out this is what network effects is all about right there's there's all these companies you just listed they want to see ethereum succeed they need it to succeed because they're building on it right and and there's so much Capital there's billions and billions and billions of dollars of capital that exists on ethereum they need to see
ethereum to succeed and so again Network effects that's what's happening here and then if you if you think about developers uh maybe you have that you can pull up here Jay is if you look at what is the chain that has the most developers well this is new developers but if you go to the the one um go to the other one yeah so what is the chain that has the most developers again which one gives you the most chances to succeed the more developers you have the more chances you have of that that L2 or that app that really succeeds here and if you look at the numbers ethereum dominates every other Chain by a long shot so this one that that Jay has up on the screen here is separating it by um by continent and you can see that in in Asia um it's pretty close actually
ethereum and um and salana but in every other part of the World Europe uh North America uh South what is that South America etherium is double or triple any other blockchain right salana is number two for all them which is great salana has seen some incredible growth in 2024 specifically uh actually beating ethereum and in its l2s but in total if you look at the aggregate of all the developers um ethereum is 23x at least of what Salon is right uh I think it's even more that so the again you got to look at where the devel velers are where are the companies where's the liquidity um and even let's talk liquidity we didn't even pull up this chart yet but the tvl of ethereum is like what 80 billion or 90 billion or something like that the next closest at least what
salana is is something like I don't know 10 or eight I think it's at like it's nowhere close right and so again when instit this is the other bull case for ethereum in my opinion is when Trump comes in and he changes regulation and allows corporations and institutions to use defi well they're not going to use Sal because there's no liquidity there they actually can't remember institutions aren't coming in with a hundred bucks to take it alone they're coming in with a 100 million bucks or you know 10 billion dollars that they want to come and use with Defi and that only works when there's billions of of dollars on the other side of that trade or the other side of that that loan or whatever they're trying to do and so ethereum defi is set up perfectly for that world and so that's the other bull
case for me is that I think institutions are going to come in largely next year as regulations improve and the only choice they to really use defi I'm sure they're going to build on salon and do other things like PayPal already is doing but when they really want to bring big amounts of capital in they're going to do it on ethereum because that's just the only spot that can do it right now um so there's just a lot of bull cases for ethereum in 2025 in my opinion yeah it feels it really does feel I got to admit uh from over the last uh month I would say I've have really changed my view and and I'll be honest I'm a big holder price drives narrative price has out performed the last 30 days and so what happens everyone's like yeah you know what ethereum that thing's pretty
good there you go there you go but I don't think everyone else is caught up though I don't think anyone else is it's still early days yeah it's still I don't think the narrative has changed at all like if anything The Narrative has gone it continues to go away from eth because other than the ETF that's the one thing that you look at that chart and you're like oh like the past few weeks like damn it's on finally you know it's really funny we had Matt Hogan on the show back in June when the eth ETF launched and he predicted 5 billion in net inflows by the end of the year and I I a month ago I was chatting with him and I was like man you were wrong about that prediction he was like yeah I got that one wrong but now it's at like two
and a half billion and we still got two weeks left in the year as we record this he actually might he actually might make it and it shows how quickly things can change H Kai thanks so much for joining us today and breaking this all down for you uh everybody listen in I want to know you are you bullish or you bearish on eath are you holding are you buying how you feel feeling about eth I know that you can tell Kyle's very bullish I am definitely becoming much more of an eth Bull and really want to encourage everybody not to make the mistake of selling now like I think there's a lot of people that now is the moment when they capitulate and they say I'm out of this I'm done if you haven't done that already I think 2025 could be a real
Banger for eth well what what I just want to wrap up with one thing is remember we're not fighting for the pie anymore the pie is about to just grow and expand like crazy since November since Trump Trump one the amount of new people in New Capital has coming to the space is insane and that's not stopping in 2025 and Beyond and so remember we had a pie and that pie wasn't really growing for the last two years and so salana was fighting for it and ethereum and soie Etc and so like yeah when one would do well another would not do well right that was because just money was moving P top like back and forth now we are entering a world where that pie is about to just grow and grow and grow and so everything can actually do well and so you don't need to be travel anymore
ethereum can flourish and do well soak in salana so consy it's going to be a beautiful thing so we don't need to be have this tribalism we can just like watch everything grow together and just like I'll be happy that won't happen because Twitter hates to be happy but it could happen if you watch milk road because we are happy people I think oh I love it crypto it's a beautiful thing thanks for listening in everybody have a wicked awesome day as always if you liked today's episode please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in description to our free 5 minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing
game we're going to also leave a link for milk Road Pro you get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying this is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose thanks so much for listening in my friends have a wicked awesome day