Permabull Tom Lee of Fundstrat Global Advisors has endorsed the $250,000 price target for Ethereum (ETH), which was outlined in a recent report.
Lee, one of Wall Street’s most famed permabulls, claims that the report is a “fresh and comprehensive take” on Ethereum’s future.
The $31 trillion math equation
The framework that argues Ethereum will eventually absorb the monetary premium currently dominated by gold and Bitcoin.
The Etherealize report argues that Ethereum is structurally superior to both. If ETH were to capture that combined $31.5 trillion premium, dividing it across the roughly 121 million ETH currently in circulation results in an implied price of over $250,000 per coin.
The researchers point to a famous critique by legendary investor Warren Buffett (“Oracle of Omaha”), who said that gold is completely unproductive. If you hold an ounce of gold for a century, you will still only have one ounce. Bitcoin suffers from the exact same limitation.
Ethereum, however, generates a return by being held and staked to secure the network. Stakers earn a 2% to 4% annual yield generated from network transaction fees and protocol issuance. Staking ETH does not require trusting a third party to remain solvent, meaning that there is no counterparty risk.
“One model inefficiently destroys resources, while the other compounds them… ETH is the first asset in history that is both [productive and a bearer asset],” the report says.
The lesson of silver
The report has compared Bitcoin’s future to the historical demonetization of silver in the late 19th century.
The researchers argue that Bitcoin is facing a looming security crisis due to its consistently shrinking mining rewards with each halving.
Conversely, Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) security model scales directly with its price. A bad actor would need to acquire and risk billions of dollars’ worth of ETH, which would be slashed (destroyed) by the protocol during an attack.
