HiMJ
7K posts

HiMJ
@himjjo
Seoul Sketch/ 24 yrs on Korea Equity, first as an institutional portfolio manager, then as as an equity strategist and macro trader.


Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan: “Ethereum is the leading play on stablecoins and tokenization” “The community had gone somewhat astray and was in the depths of despair earlier this year with a super long technical roadmap and accusations of being ‘ivory tower’, and now they’re much more tasked on the market. I think they’re shipping better. I think the community is focused on investors. I think it’s their market to lose on stablecoins and tokenization, so I’m very bullish on ETH and own a lot of it — it’s the second largest position in our crypto index fund. Very very bullish.” Matt believes the market is underestimating tokenization in particular: “You have the chair of the SEC saying the entire market will move onto blockchain-based rails. You have the CEO of the largest asset manager saying every asset will be tokenized. And yet, people still talk more about stablecoins than they do about tokenization. Tokenization is a bigger market. There’s $100 trillion of equities. There’s more of that of bonds. There’s even more of that in real estate. Those are enormous markets. The New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, CBOE, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan — they’re all focused on this space. I just think it will happen faster than people think. I come from the ETF industry, and people were hugely skeptical of that as an evolution in financial markets. I saw the same sort of grassroots-level adoption there that I’m seeing in tokenization. I think people are underestimating the uptick.” Ethereum has 61.4% market share of all tokenized assets ($206.2 billion). Source: @KevinWSHPod (Jan 2026)




Erik Vorhees: “ETH is still the king, and I don’t see it being dethroned" The founder of ShapeShift and Venice AI is asked if Ethereum was a “sustainable ecosystem.” He replies: “I think [Ethereum] is more than sustainable. I think it is the clear winner of the smart contract innovation. It actually wasn’t the first mover in smart contracts, but it was the first one to achieve any sort of scale with smart contracts. What’s most important about Ethereum isn’t so much the first-mover advantage as much as it is the network effect it has had since it was released.” Erik continues: “I think both Bitcoin and Ethereum have achieved a network effect that is close to unassailable. People have gotten distracted with some of these other L1s, but if you look at metrics like where the developers are and where stablecoin volumes are, these are hard to fake metrics that are very important. They’ve always been predominantly on Ethereum. It’s not even close. I’m glad that other people tried to build L1s. The process of innovation and competition is really important. But ETH is still the king, and I don’t see it being dethroned. It has had various scaling challenges — the patchwork of L2s and the UX problems between them sucks. But I have a suspicion that Base is going to end up becoming the predominant L2 on top of the predominant L1 of ETH and that vertical is going to be very powerful and very strong. So yes, I’m always bullish on ETH in the same way I’m always bullish on Bitcoin.” However, Erik warns that if Base loses its permissionlessness it “will flounder and deserves to die”: “Base has designed things very well. It has gotten a lot of adoption and very quickly became the major L2 even though it was not the first mover. I think it’s gaining a network effect pretty quickly. It obviously has a very powerful corporate ally in Coinbase, and to the degree that Coinbase does not abuse that privilege, that’s a very good privilege. Abuse here means: if Coinbase tries to exert control over base such that it loses its permissionlessness, then it will flounder and deserves to die. But Coinbase has been a very good actor in this regard, and they deserve a lot of credit for demonstrating the principles of decentralization and permissionless innovation in several parts of what they do. Obviously the centralized exchange is not that, but it’s not trying to be either.” Source: @CoinDesk (Dec 2025)

























