Welcome to BitBoy Crypto!
My name is AJ.
And this is the Price Prediction Department.
Before I dive into this,
I want to thank the entire community for all the positive feedback
on last week's XRP video.
That video was the best one that we've had so far
in the Price Prediction Department.
And it wouldn't have been possible without the BitSquad.
Thank you to each and every one of you.
So moving forward with this segment,
you know, we still have a lot of coins left to cover,
and as time goes on, I want to start getting into those smaller coins
and maybe packaging, like, two or three of them into one video,
but it's been brought to my attention
that I am yet to cover the second largest crypto in existence.
So here we go.
This one's on Ethereum.
Let's get it!
The Ethereum whitepaper was released back in 2013
by a 19-year-old kid named Vitalik Buterin.
In late July of 2015,
Ethereum rolled out publicly,
and it's basically been an uphill ride ever since.
We all know that Vitalik was the mastermind,
but he was not alone in building out Ethereum.
Many of you know that Charles Hoskinson and Gavin Wood were on the original Ethereum team
before they had their differences and went their separate ways,
with Charles going to build Cardano and Gavin going to build Polkadot.
Ethereum has quite the story.
And they'll probably make a movie about it someday.
But to get down to brass tacks,
most of us already know what Ethereum does and what it's capable of.
If you don't know,
simply put,
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform that creates and executes smart contracts.
With that comes the development of decentralized applications
also known as dApps.
These applications range from DeFi to DEXs to NFTs to gaming
to identity solutions,
and the list goes on and on.
The medium to interact with the Ethereum network
is the crypto we all know and love called Ether.
But most of us just call it ETH.
Today, ETH is the second largest crypto by market cap.
I really want to stress that point.
Ethereum is clearly in a league of its--
okay.
Where was I?
Right. Ethereum is in a league of its own.
And you know me.
I like to add things up.
And I did some math.
And what I found is insane.
As of right now,
this was filmed on Thursday, by the way,
if you don't include stablecoins,
and you add up the market cap of every coin below Ethereum
starting with XRP all the way down to The Sandbox,
which is 51st by market cap,
if you add all of those coins up,
that market cap is still smaller than Ethereum's.
I made that point so you can really try to wrap your mind around
how much money we're talking about here.
That's what I mean when I say that Ethereum is in a league of its own.
And that will definitely come into play when calculating this price prediction.
And before we keep going here,
I want to take a second to thank Stake for sponsoring this video.
So, of course, Ethereum's market cap is very impressive,
but what about some of the other numbers that Ethereum is putting up?
It's when I looked at their website is when I realized how impressive this really was.
Right here on ethereum.org,
Ethereum in numbers,
there are over 4,000 projects built on Ethereum,
there's $410 billion secured on Ethereum,
there's over 96 million wallets with an ETH balance,
there's over 53.3 million smart contracts on Ethereum,
and a little over 1 million Ethereum transactions just happened today.
So as you can see, I'm pretty big on Ethereum,
but I want to stay as unbiased as possible and play the devil's advocate
for any coin that I do a prediction on.
And as far as I think Ethereum can possibly go in the future,
that's not set in stone,
and there are factors that could get in the way of Ethereum
getting where I think it could go to.
Just as the XRP case ended and we finally have like a win in crypto,
of course, this article comes out.
New US Senate bill wants to regulate DeFi like a bank
and it would require DeFi protocols to impose bank-like controls on their user base.
So my point here is a lot of Ethereum is based around, you know, building DeFi,
building decentralized exchanges, lending and borrowing protocols,
and if this bill was to happen,
that would put a damper on the overall ecosystem
and what we are allowed to do now and what we might not be allowed to do later.
So please keep that in mind not just for Ethereum but for DeFi as a whole.
Another thing I'd like to bring up in this video is The Merge.
I know. I know. The Merge is old news.
But for price predictions, it's a relevant topic
because to make an educated estimate,
you need to have a firm grasp on tokenomics,
and The Merge definitely changed that for Ethereum.
So let's talk about its significance.
If you're new to crypto,
The Merge happened September 15 last year.
And simply put, it's when Ethereum switched from proof-of-work to proof-of stake.
The Merge refers to the Ethereum mainnet merging with a proof-of-stake blockchain
called the Beacon Chain.
The Merge made the network more secure,
a little bit faster,
but really the big win for The Merge was sustainability.
After The Merge was complete,
Ethereum reduced its energy consumption by 99.95%,
making it a green blockchain.
Not only does this make more sense environmentally speaking,
but it looks really good for optics and it silenced a lot of critics.
And, you know, to be honest,
that's really the biggest pushback to Bitcoin and to proof-of-work.
Like, don't get me wrong,
I'm all for Bitcoin,
but it does use more energy in one year than the entire country of Ukraine,
and it also uses 50,000 times more energy than Ethereum after The Merge completed.
Since I'm big on tokenomics,
to be honest, my favorite part of The Merge is what it did for Ethereum's issuance,
or the new coins coming into the supply.
You have to understand,
unlike other coins,
Ethereum doesn't have a cap on its supply.
And that can be really scary for your bags, you know.
I mean, if any project doubles the amount of coins in its circulating supply,
that really devalues your investment.
And that's why The Merge really saved the day for Ethereum in terms of its supply.
So before The Merge,
there was about 13,000 new Ethereum minted every day.
Now, it's only 1,600.
Its issuance has dropped 90%.
And it gets even better
because of the EIP-1559 upgrade during the London hardfork,
they implemented a burning mechanism into Ethereum's gas fees.
And since The Merge,
this has gradually taken coins out of Ethereum's circulating supply,
making it deflationary.
More on that later.
We all know that Ethereum really has to work on lowering those gas fees
and reducing its network congestion.
So Ethereum's roadmap is in six phases.
Those phases are The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge and the Splurge.
What do each of these do?
Let's take a look at Ethereum's website.
The Merge, we already did that.
We went from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
The Surge is upgrades related to scalability by rollups and data sharding.
So the Scourge is updates related to censorship resistance,
decentralization and protocol risks from the MEV.
The MEV stands for maximal extractable value.
The Verge are upgrades related to verifying blocks more easily.
The Purge is upgrades related to reducing the number of computational costs of running nodes
and simplifying the protocol.
And The Splurge is other upgrades that don't fit well into the previous categories.
So there is an overview of what is to come with Ethereum.
I'm pretty sure it'll take probably, like, 5-10 years to finish this roadmap.
A lot of you might be wondering,
"What about Ethereum's gas fees?"
"Ethereum is really expensive to use."
"When does sharding come into the picture?"
So, originally, sharding is what was going to be used to lower the gas fees with Ethereum.
However, the layer 2 projects like Polygon, Optimism, etc.,
those have developed much faster than expected and already helped Ethereum scale a lot.
And that will be even more true once Proto-Danksharding is implemented.
So normal sharding is no longer needed and has been dropped from the roadmap.
And according to the Ethereum website,
Danksharding makes layer 2 rollups much cheaper for users
by adding "blobs" of data to Ethereum blocks.
And that right there answers the question of "When are gas fees going to be cheaper?"
There you go.
And with all that being said, let's get in to the price prediction.
So Ethereum's previous all-time high was $4,847 on November 10, 2021.
Ethereum's circulating supply was a little over 118 million
with a market cap around $576 billion.
It is worth noting that Ethereum's market cap from its previous all-time high is only $2 billion
below Bitcoin's market cap right now.
So maybe the flippening is possible.
More on that in a second.
As of right now, Ethereum is down around 60% from its all-time high,
and it's priced just under $1,900.
Ethereum's supply is currently 120.19 million,
and its market cap is a little over $227 billion.
So, yes, Ethereum has a little bit of work to do to catch up to its previous market cap,
but in terms of tokenomics,
its supply has only gone up 1.77% since the top of the last bull run.
And this is really good
considering some coins are going to have double the supply that they had last time.
So remember what I said earlier about Ethereum being deflationary since The Merge?
Let's look into that.
Ultrasound.money is a great tool to look at Ethereum's supply,
its future supply,
and it has some mind-blowing facts since The Merge.
Here on your screen is ultrasound.money.
And as you can see,
Ethereum's supply has gone down a little under 300,000 since The Merge.
And if you click this button here that says simulate proof-of-work,
the screen changes,
and there would actually be 3.2 million more Ethereum in the supply
if they didn't switch to proof-of-stake.
If you scroll down on the website at the 2-year projection,
you will see that Ethereum's supply peak was 120.5 million.
And it is projected that by June of 2025, there will be 117.7 million Ethereum in circulation.
And since figuring out what the supply is going to be by November of 2025,
this is a very useful tool for me and for you if you want to do a price prediction of your own.
So remember,
the equation for price prediction is price equals market cap
divided by circulating supply.
And I estimate that by November of '25,
Ethereum's supply will be about 117.5 million Ethereum.
But what about the market cap?
Specifically for this price prediction, I'm going to do something I've never done before.
For this video,
I'm going to estimate Ethereum's future market cap by using dominance.
So let's break this down.
At the top of the last bull market,
the total market cap of all of crypto added up together was a little over $3 trillion.
And Ethereum's dominance was 22.4% at its all-time high.
And by dominance,
I mean 22.4% of all the money in crypto was Ethereum at its all-time high.
At the day of Bitcoin's all-time high, its dominance was about 44%.
So Ethereum needs to double its dominance for the flippening to happen.
The flippening is a common conversation in crypto.
And basically the question is,
will Ethereum ever pass Bitcoin in market cap?
There are strong arguments on both sides of this coin.
I just spoke with BitBoy about this topic about an hour ago.
And he says that if Ethereum is ever going to flip Bitcoin,
it's going to happen this coming bull run.
His explanation was is if you go back and look at the bull run in 2017,
once Bitcoin peak and hit its all-time high, it started falling dramatically.
And this is when the altcoins started to pick up
because people were taking their profits from the top of the Bitcoin market
and converting them into altcoins.
This kind of creates like a wave,
and as Bitcoin dominance is falling down,
Ethereum dominance is catching up.
And that explains Ben's idea.
If we see a similar situation to what we saw in 2017,
Bitcoin dominance will be falling and Ethereum dominance will be catching up.
And that's the moment the flippening will happen.
And the fact that these things happen in waves is what will make it possible.
So keep that in mind as we move forward here.
But remember, the all-time market cap for all of crypto at the previous all-time high
was a little over $3 trillion.
So by the top of the next bull run,
I'm hoping we can get somewhere between $7 trillion and $10 trillion.
So say the overall market cap does get to $7 trillion
and Ethereum can regain that 22.4% dominance level.
If that happened,
Ethereum's market cap would be $1.56 trillion
and each ETH would cost about $13,300.
And if the total market cap went to $10 trillion and Ethereum regained that same level of dominance,
that would take Ethereum's market cap to $2.24 trillion
and one Ethereum would cost you $19,100.
And listen. I get it.
I know that the dominance chart fluctuates every day.
I'm just trying to think outside the box on what's possible
considering so many people have strong feelings about if Ethereum can flip Bitcoin or not.
And if Ethereum did flip Bitcoin,
those dominance numbers would go much higher.
So when someone asks me,
"AJ, what's your price prediction for Ethereum for the top of the next bull run?"
I'm going to say, "About $13,300 to $19,100."
Boom! There you go.
There's your Ethereum price prediction.
I want to know down below in the comments.
What do you think?
Was I too bullish?
Was I too conservative?
I think for larger cap coins,
dominance might be a smart way to try to estimate future market cap.
I want to know what you think about that as well.
And I think moving forward, for those larger cap coins,
I'm going to consider dominance like I did in this one.
And think about where we are in Ethereum.
Yeah, we're past The Merge, but we're still pretty early on the roadmap.
So I was talking to Kelly Kellam about this video,
and he basically told me, like,
we know that the Bitcoin ETFs are, like, they're in the registry.
Like, hopefully, they're going to come.
And if the Bitcoin spot ETFs get approved,
the Ethereum spot ETFs are going to be right behind it.
And when I asked him and Ben what their Ethereum prediction was,
they both said about $17,000 to $18,000 per Ethereum.
So the three of us were in the same ballpark,
but I still want to know what you think below in the comments.
With all that being said,
my name is Ajwritescrypto,
and have yourself a great rest of your weekend.