Alex McFarlane

What could be wrong about this? tldr; ETH will grow by at least 40x. 100B–1T transactions daily in all finance Will be 1-5T in the next 5-10 years. Eth does ~2.5M tx/day today. Gas prices have a floor of 10-100x where they are today. Upper limit is 200,000x todays revenue (theoretical limit based on revenue - impossible with mkt cap) Lower limit market penetration is 1%, 1T txns, 100x decrease in gas. Lower limit is 40x within 10 years. ETH must hit ATH 80k on a revenue basis alone. I think this ties out as I'd struggle to see ETH market cap < $10Tr if blockchain is adopted for all global financial transactions in the next ten years.

@bitcoinduke yeah I think so - tradfi is also indeed moving on-chain. They're becoming extremely excited about distribution on the EVM x.com/flipdazed/stat…

@flipdazed right tradfi moving onchain is probably one of the few scenarios where ETH still feels wildly underpriced

What could be wrong about this? tldr; ETH will grow by at least 40x. 100B–1T transactions daily in all finance Will be 1-5T in the next 5-10 years. Eth does ~2.5M tx/day today. Gas prices have a floor of 10-100x where they are today. Upper limit is 200,000x todays revenue (theoretical limit based on revenue - impossible with mkt cap) Lower limit market penetration is 1%, 1T txns, 100x decrease in gas. Lower limit is 40x within 10 years. ETH must hit ATH 80k on a revenue basis alone. I think this ties out as I'd struggle to see ETH market cap < $10Tr if blockchain is adopted for all global financial transactions in the next ten years.

isn't this kind of counter intuitive because the main protagonists are complaining gas is too cheap, so a gas spike should bolster the price support even more? I think your point is that when gas is volatile people stop transacting but we're still at ATHs of transactions despite massive gas volatility and pricing in the past. Imo thats short term vs long term.

@flipdazed that's way too simplistic we've seen gas spikes happen before and it crippled eth usage

@arx_void Ah that’s fair - I thought ETH was largely flat in supply though ?

@flipdazed you're missing expanding ETH supply. Otherwise you're right

Global markets process just under $25T/day and somewhere between 100B–1T transactions daily. Stablecoins are already breaking $1T/day in volume, while Ethereum only does ~2.5M tx/day today. I think gas prices have a floor of 10-100x where they are today on ETH. Even that, if Ethereum becomes the global settlement layer for finance, the network still has 40,000x growth ahead of it. If ETH captures even 50% of that future market, Ethereum fee capture looks ~20,000x underpriced.

So I've gotten a bunch of counter-arguments here that I think have made me dramatically more bearish about ETH. The market seems to agree: ETH hit an ATH in the 4000s in 2021, recovered only to that same level in 2025, but has fallen back down and is not recovering. BTC got into the low 60k range in 2021, then hit the 120s in 2025, and now sits at roughly $77k, well above the 2021 ATH, and vastly outperforming ETH over that timeframe. Why? If you don't think there will be a future link to ETH collecting fees, you are essentially saying ETH will have value because people want to own it, and they want to own it because it has value. This is a fundamentally circular argument. The idea that they are valued by "the economies they enable" is simply not going to be true over the long run; power is valued by the cost of generation and relative other uses of capital, not by the size of the "economy it enables", otherwise electricity would be the most expensive thing in the world. I propose most of ETH's current value is from people who believed the network will grow to become a significant part of the financial future and that ETH itself will somehow be able to collect fees, rents, or other value in the form of accrual to ETH in that world. If that's not true, then it's an open question why the token has much value at all? It probably shouldn't! If it's just some sort of very low cost fee thing without clear value accrual, it should be valued like electricity: pure marginal supply and demand, which also means ETH needs to definitely drive way, way, way more activity and way, way, way more consumer adoption, so the recent EF proposals are a negative. In the case of BTC, it's clear that value comes from a psychological belief in the monetary premium, though also worth noting that the only asset that has sustained that belief over time in the history of man is gold. BTC has not been trading well as a chaos hedge, and some are starting to revisit this thesis (see @mcuban) and I would also take that as signal. Put differently: if your value thesis for crypto is that it's going to re-write the fundamental laws of economics and investing, I'm going to bet on those and not the price of the token.

@doganeth_en That’s not actually the biggest issue - compliance and onboarding costs are. Once they scale they have huge issues with costs of compliance operations.

Yeah it is clear that no crypto card has a sustainable business model. Clear reasons: - The TAM for USDC holders to settle in USD is relatively small -- especially compared to the exact card market. - If you target mass market, you either have to target US (to not face with FX fee) or you'll deal FX markups. - If you have to deal FX markups, then you (or your user) have to pay a percentage of the payment that is sometimes higher than interchange fee - And with the 3-5% cashbacks, they're not sustainable. You either have to fund those programs with other revenues (like having yield program or making money with AUM) or you're loosing money. A lot of companies are still spending their money like we're in bull market and everyone wants their neobank that has one of the worst UXs in the market. We first need to solve the FX issue that card programs are dealing (traditional neobanks solve this with their Bank infra) , and then we can go to the mass market.

@rleshner @ProfAnalytics Isn't the concern that this democratises secondary OTC synthetics which fall outside of the realm of practical enforcement?

@ProfAnalytics Dan, there are many types of tokenization; you’re right for “no KYC, permissionless” versions of tokenization / synthetic, but incorrect for issuer-sponsored tokenization

Tokenized securities exponentially increase insider trading risks for public companies b/c compliance officers will be unable to track employees’ trading of the tokenized security on the blockchain. e.g., Want to evade the blackout window? Just buy the tokenized security. Do purchases and sales of tokenized securities by Section 16 insiders trigger required disclosures? Would the GC even know? How?

@newmichwill @bitcoin_yield @yieldbasis Interesting - you're kind of translating the known and bounded deviation from a known reference price into a PnL for LPs? I guess the difference here is that this is constant time under Q whereas I'm talking about a measure under P

@flipdazed @bitcoin_yield @yieldbasis Check this out github.com/curvefi/curve-…

Volatility unlocks yield.

@newmichwill @bitcoin_yield @yieldbasis note that I jammed this into AI for the image and i cba to correct it, the far RHS chart should obviously have the same long term higher price as the middle.

I think you misunderstood the reply - I'm saying that if a strategy increases the variance of the underlying asset then it will lose money as a systematic strategy (caveats of doing non illegal things) I agree that \[ v(t) = c - mt \] for fixed \[m\] and \[c\] has zero volatility but you are 100% guaranteed to lose money. The thought experiment I had on this a while back was whether transparent rules-based trading strategies would actually get better execution than dark rules-based trading strategies. I thought as a simple example of a sudden buy order which causes a step function in demand vs time. The result in price is talked about in Bouchard's book Trades Quotes and Prices - which explains through correlation functions why the price runs away exponentially and overshoots, decaying with an inverse function vs time looking like a "sharks fin" and stabilising at the new long-term price. The two key features: (1) top of fin - starting price; and (2) stable long term price - starting price are described by two different processes. The adverse process being the overreaction of the market causing (1) because people don't know how many more "buy" orders remain from this secret buyer. If, however, the market knows in advance this purchase is coming you should see (in a perfect noiseless system / spherical cow) the step function should decay into a sigmoid with steepness that is related to the risk-free rate. At this point there is is no information for any external trader to benefit from as I assume it's a Nash equilibrium and no-one can perturb the system without losing money. The ansatz, not empirically tested, is that transparent rules-based strategies (where the rules themselves are known risk premia) would likely benefit from transparency.

@IOHK_Charles riddled with typos as per usual but you get the gist.

Governance is just a machine learning optimisation problem and you have a trade off: bias vs variance Centralised or autocratic governance sacrifices variance for bias. This means you will almost always, quickly, find a locally stable point for an organisation. Variance, or decentralisation prioritises variance. The big problem is that decentralisation without rules is anarchy. Cardano is so decentralised it's basically anarchistic right now. Ethereum would become the same if Vitalik stepped aside. The friction between you and Cardano Foundation imo is boiled down to you having a strong vision, resources, ability to coordinate and direction vs. the foundation that are various factions fighting to impose their own "bias" This basically happens in every governance structure, being local ganglands through to nation states and DAOs when you remove the centralised leadership and impose pure democracy or decentralisation. Unbounded variance is that it will explore erratically. Rules and structure must be put in place first and most importantly a social structure and trust in that social structure. DAOs try to make that social process trustless but they have generally failed to do anything beyond the equity model other than increase distribution and therefore entropy and tend towards anarchy. In my opinion, the best thing for the cardano ecosystem would be to follow early British structures as they moved toward decentralisation. I suggest this because Britain did this without external influence, whereas constitutions are created with strong bias. I would look towards the initial creation of a parliament around a monarchy. Crown "King Charles I of Cardano, the Duke of Midnight" and create a parliament that can make proposals but ultimately must be granted charter by the King.

I've begun a comprehensive governance review of over 11,000 DAOs and a decade of literature in and out of our space to study executive function, roadmap, and strategy setting. The goal will be to propose some ideas to add new features to Cardano's governance via the constitution and new technology that will resolve much of the conflict we are facing. I'm considering if it is prudent at this point to become a Drep and to host a new mini-convention to get it done in time for the 2027 process. More on this later. #CardanoUnityAndClarity

Who the heck is saying Ethereum is dead? Why would it be dead? It’s got more TVL than any other chain by about 10x; it’s got every major FI looking at building tokenised assets in its rails; it literally is nucleus of decentralised finance. It’s just as silly as when someone states “let’s stop questioning whether the world is round.” The statement itself lends credibility to a a totally ridiculous claim to start with!

Food for thoughts. How about we stop fighting among crypto tribes and instead fight together for crypto to win? “Ethereum is dead” is an expedited way to discredit the value of the entire blockchain industry, and alongside your favorite “altcoins”. Fight for crypto.

Manifesting - future her is gonna be so pissed at me if we’re not

The under appreciated sacrifices of startup wives

@HorinekPM How about passive ETFs and predefined rule based allocations ?

I will never not be annoyed by asset managers calling themselves "programmatic AI-enabled allocators" when they're just API aggregators

@uhr3al This is a dumb stat - there’s more people in Europe proper and, the average age is higher and the poverty rate is significantly slower.

the australian mind cannot comprehend anything here

@sealaunch_ @nomos_paradox crypto basis hedgefund/commodity dealer with a side pocket in tbills that purports to never have a drawdown

RWAs is an awful term and I think we’re watching the same dynamic play out that we saw with stablecoins. “Stablecoins” is itself a loosely applied label that a broad range of assets with very different risk profiles, yet borrows credibility from the least risky examples in the category. There’s a wide range of assets that can be brought onchain, and they won’t scale the same way. Permissioned assets will likely capture the deepest capital pools, but move slower due to compliance and structuring constraints. More open approaches can scale faster earlier.