Still optimistic about this bull market; the $ETH returns may exceed $BTC

In recent years, the core narrative behind BTC has become clearer and clearer—digital gold.

Its biggest advantage is that consensus is strong enough, and its monetary attributes are becoming more and more obvious. But on the flip side, BTC’s upside potential will ultimately be constrained by issues such as gold’s market cap, resistance to quantum attacks, and privacy.

So if you ask me about the absolute return potential for the coming few years, I’m actually more focused on ETH.

I’ve always felt that BTC and ETH are fundamentally not the same kind of asset. BTC is more like gold on-chain, while ETH is more like a set of open global financial and computing infrastructure.

In fact, you can even understand it simply as: BTC is responsible for “value storage,” while Ethereum is responsible for “carrying value.”

So in the future, there may be two scenarios: the Ethereum ecosystem becomes increasingly prosperous, but a large amount of value remains stuck in the L2 and application layers, leaving ETH itself relatively lackluster; alternatively, the ecosystem’s prosperity could eventually form a true economic flywheel, continuously strengthening ETH’s value capture until its market cap ultimately runs neck and neck with BTC.

Of course, there’s also another possibility: the ecosystem becomes more prosperous, but most of the value is taken by the L2 and application layers, and ETH itself doesn’t benefit in step.

That’s why I think investing in BTC only requires understanding gold, inflation, and cycles. But to truly understand ETH, you may need to understand the blockchain itself first—along with the economics behind it.

That’s also why I’ve long been bullish on ETH. What I want to study isn’t how much it could rise in the next cycle, but how much value this permissionless global network can ultimately carry.