For the longest time all I heard was "man I can't wait for mainstream adoption of crypto" well I hate to break it to you it's pretty much already here. You can now buy, trade and sell crypto for Fiat across many platforms and you have more options then ever before include a spot Bitcoin ETF.
But I always warned about what that could mean as Bitcoin was created out of the ashes of the real estate collapse of 2009 - 2011 which turned into a deep recession.
Why in the world would you want those same companies and banks not involved with crypto but guess what that is where we find ourselves once again.
BlackRock
Some people think that blackrock is amazing and happy they pushed bitcoin ETFs and pushed the SEC into doing it. I will admit it was a necessary evil that was needed because of how aggressive the white house and SEC have been towards crypto over the last few years.
However, the next push is for Ethereums ETF and the final deadline isn't far away. 5/23/2024, 5/24/2024 and 5/30/2024 are all Ethereum ETFs that are in the final deadline for the SEC to make up their minds on. We do figure that these will get rejected.
The two big players however Fidelity and Blackrock have theirs coming in the start of August.
The reason why this one might get approved is how aggressive blackrock has been and their proven track record at getting ETFs approved. It also goes right in line with their RWA token which is built on Ethereum. So you can start to see why this company will be pushing hard to get this Ethereum ETF approved.
Currently Ethereum is trading at around $3,000 per which is actully huge as this was the value of it during the last bull run. It seems to be slowly losing value over time and there's really no reason for it besides the constant trash headlines you get from news and the SEC bashing against it.
However it's important to note that the SEC really has no grounds to declare Ethereum as a security. If it has to this will most likely go into the court system again in which the SEC will be sued yet again and Ethereum will become a traded spot Ethereum ETF just like bitcoin was.
Ethereum Layer 2's
You also have to account that you have some MAJOR players in the Ethereum layer two system. Arbitrum, Optimism and Base are some of the biggest names of which most of the activity is now and then broadcast their bulk transactions on to Ethereum. This core structure is used by mega companies like Coinbase and I believe that says a lot in terms of the value of the Ethereum blockchain.
It's also important to note that Ethereum is no longer burning more than it's producing. This is a pretty wild change and shows that the solutions to scale through layer 2 options is working.
*Image pulled from Ultrasound Money
The other factor is you have massive places like Blackrock, Blockchain capital, Morgan Stanley, Ava Labs, Circle and others all building layer two solutions on Ethereum for their own company.
That should give you a very good idea as to the demand and capabilities of Ethereum over something like Bitcoin.
The other factor that Ethereum has going for it is that it has a method to the madness that Bitcoin simply does not. That's proof of stake and we will have to see how this affects the token compared to Bitcoin.
With Ethereum you're locking up a big portion of the Ethereum into the proof of stake system and it's unclear at the moment of these ETFs will stake any of it themselves to offer up some type of dividend yield on the ETFs which would be pretty wild. We kind of see this already with the likes of Coinbase in which they pay you part of the staking rewards on Ethereum.
There's a lot of options and a lot of unique aspects to Ethereum that Bitcoin simply doesn't have and it's curious to me how that's going to start playing out this year.