• Joseph Lubin posted on November 11 that no platform will match ETH's monetary premium within two years.

• Lubin cites staking, ETH burning and BitMine's push toward 5% of all ether as supply forces.

• ETH has lost more than a third of its value over the past year.

The Supply Squeeze Lubin Describes

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Joseph Lubin expects demand for the asset to outstrip its supply within roughly two years, and he made that case this week in a public exchange on X with Jeff Dorman, chief investment officer at crypto fund Arca. Dorman had pressed ETH bulls to explain what actually gives the token its value. Lubin, who also serves as MetaMask's chief executive, replied on November 11 that Dorman is reading a “snapshot of the current state” while ignoring what he calls the inevitable trajectory. His reply on X states that financial institutions and the market infrastructure behind them are already on Ethereum, that more are coming, and that Consensys is working with some of them. The software firm recently spun MetaMask off into a separate company.

In Lubin's telling, several forces will tighten supply from here. Users will bid for scarce, high-value block space. Staking, secured by the Casper protocol, moves ETH out of the circulating supply, and a practical walkthrough of staking Ethereum shows how directly that lock-up binds holders. Digital asset treasuries keep accumulating too, with BitMine's Ethereum treasury push toward 5% of all ether the largest running example. Heavier network activity burns additional ETH on top of all three. Lubin bundles the mechanics under one name, the monetary premium of ETH, and dates the outcome: “In perhaps 2 years no platform will have anywhere close to the monetary premium of ETH.”

The market has not signed on. The Ethereum (ETH) price has lost more than a third of its value over the past year and trades below half of its all-time high from August 2025. Some traders read the chart the other way. One comparison circulating this week shows ETH dropped about 26% in both mid-2025 and its current pullback, and in 2025 that decline came immediately before a sharp rally. The trader behind the chart expects a repeat.

Mainstream Users Have Not Shown Up

In a separate post the same day, Lubin conceded a point the chart makes on its own: crypto still lacks applications that mainstream users find compelling. Most people buy ETH and Bitcoin to hold them speculatively, he wrote. The engagement the network has attracted comes from two groups he names without ceremony, protocol and cryptography specialists who build and keep testing Ethereum itself, and finance enthusiasts who have stress-tested its DeFi layer. Real users with everyday needs have, on his own account, stayed away.

The same post credits U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Michael Selig with clearing much of the regulatory uncertainty that slowed the sector, and it holds up MetaMask as the lever that could change the picture, a self-custody wallet Lubin says is evolving into a financial super app. The destination he describes is the wider economy moving onchain, from payments to tokenized real-world assets, rather than another round of speculative accumulation.

Dorman is not won over. Ten years into the experiment, he argued in his own reply, the best theses for owning a layer-1 token are still a set of “gobbledygook rationales.” His position is the mirror image of Lubin's: where the co-founder sees institutions already arriving, the fund manager sees a value case that still leans on narrative rather than observable usage. Lubin's record gives the skeptics their own exhibit. He backs Ethlabs, a nonprofit preparing Ethereum for institutional adoption, and said as recently as October that the crypto winter had ended quite a while ago. ETH has fallen further since. The catalogue of long-horizon calls also runs to quantum-safe Ethereum (ETH) money by 2028, so the fresh two-year forecast sits inside a pattern of bullishness that runs on a clock most market cycles have yet to honor.

Outflows Counter the Two-Year Case

Our reading of the two posts is that Lubin is describing flows that have not arrived yet. Spot ETF demand points the opposite way: BlackRock's ETHA drove a $144.8M Ethereum (ETH) ETF outflow on November 11, and the treasury vehicles meant to absorb supply are under strain, with BitMine having swung to a $6.3B loss on the Ethereum decline. Accumulation at these levels exists, as when one whale rebought 6,087 ETH at $2,031 after the drop, but it is small against institutional selling. Until ETF flows and treasury demand turn, the two-year monetary premium case rests on the co-founder's conviction rather than on the tape.