Nick Tomaino, founder of cryptocurrency venture firm 1confirmation, has made a bold prediction: Ethereum (ETH) will surpass Bitcoin (BTC) in market value within the next five years.
Bitcoin’s market cap currently sits around $1.2 trillion, nearly four times Ethereum’s $321 billion market cap, but Tomaino believes the growth dynamics between the two cryptocurrencies will change.
Tomaino argues that while Bitcoin has a well-established narrative as “digital gold” that has attracted institutional investors, Ethereum has been underappreciated despite its significant impact over the last five years. Ethereum is the blockchain on which the world’s most talented developers are building the decentralized internet, and ETH serves as the “digital oil” that powers it, Tomaino says. He argues that ETH is scarce, yielding, and highly usable, and that these characteristics could attract more institutional investors over time.
“Wall Street will begin buying more ETH in the coming years and aggressively support its narrative around this,” Tomaino said. He predicts that Ethereum’s current smaller market cap compared to Bitcoin presents an opportunity for greater ownership, ultimately leading to a shift in market dominance.
Touching on other trends in the crypto space, Tomaino predicted that prediction markets will grow 100-fold in the coming years, making them the breakout market of 2024. He highlighted Polymarket, a prediction market platform that has gained traction as a tool for tracking events like the US presidential election, as an example. According to Tomaino, Polymarket’s scale, which has reached over $1.1 billion in total volume this year, would not have been possible without stablecoins on Ethereum. He expects prediction markets focused on news, culture, and sports to become much larger categories after the election.
Looking ahead, Tomaino is optimistic that decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFTs will make a strong comeback, and new industries like SocialFi will emerge. He predicts that advancements in application chains will lead to wider adoption by improving the scalability and user experience of Layer 2 (L2) solutions like Base, and Layer 3 (L3) solutions. “L1 bias will disappear, and big developers will build where they can capture the most value and have the most control,” he concluded.
*This is not investment advice.
