2021: the two targets everyone predicted were $100k $BTC and $10k $ETH.
$BTC got its $100k in Dec 2024.
$ETH never got its $10k.
And since 2021 top, $ETH has done nothing but bleed vs $BTC: ratio went 0.086 -> 0.027, lowest in ~10 months.
Conviction has fully flipped. Now it's "$BTC wins, $ETH is finished."
I'm fading that. Here's why the loudest call is wrong again:
Start with what almost nobody frames right: $BTC and $ETH are the same TYPE of asset.
Supply already distributed. No insider unlocks waiting to dump. 10+ years proving neither gets inflated away or rugged.
Almost nothing built after them can say that. These two can. They're the only 2 blue chips.
So this isn't $BTC vs some shitcoin. It's the two clean assets, and the question is which one carries less risk from here.
And rn, $BTC is the one carrying all the open problems.
1/ Saylor.
$BTC has Strategy. $ETH has Bitmine. Same trade, mirror image.
Strategy: 845,000 $BTC, cost basis ~$75.5k. $BTC ~$66k now, so they're ~13% underwater, ~$8B in the red.
Funded by ATM equity + preferred stock that pays dividends in cash ($692M paid out already). And $BTC throws off $0 to cover any of it.
So Strategy services those dividends by selling stock, or eventually $BTC. Market now prices it as a forced seller over every rally.
Bitmine (Tom Lee): 5.5M $ETH, ~4.6% of all $ETH, the largest ETH treasury. Also underwater, same bear.
But it stakes ~4.7M of that $ETH. That spins off ~$270M/yr in real yield.
The asset pays Bitmine to sit there. Strategy pays out of pocket to sit there.
Same drawdown, opposite cash flow. One treasury bleeds to hold, the other gets paid to hold.
That's the whole $ETH vs $BTC case in one frame.
2/ Productive vs dead asset.
Zoom out from the treasuries to the assets themselves.
~33% of all $ETH is staked and earns yield. Stakers get paid, supply gets locked. $ETH is a productive asset.
$BTC just sits. Its issuance goes to miners, who sell to cover power bills.
Furthermore this is $BTC's quiet long-term problem: security budget.
Fees are a rounding error of miner revenue. The block subsidy does ~all the work, and that subsidy halves every 4 years toward 0.
Nobody has solved how $BTC pays for its own security once the subsidy is gone. $ETH doesn't have that cliff: stakers are paid to secure it.
3/ Quantum.
Citi (May 2026) said it plainly: $BTC is more exposed to quantum than $ETH.
~6-6.9M $BTC sit in addresses whose public keys are already visible on-chain. No agreed migration path, slow governance.
$ETH ships upgrades every ~6 months and account abstraction gives wallets a real route to quantum-resistant sigs.
It's not that $ETH is immune. It's that $ETH can move and $BTC can't.
4/ Roadmap velocity.
Glamsterdam lands Q3 this year. Gas limit 60M -> 200M, ~78% cheaper fees, parallel execution opening the road toward 10,000 TPS.
$BTC's inertia is a feature to maxis. It's also why it's carrying every open problem above alone, with no mechanism to fix any of them fast.
So line it up:
- Treasury cash flow: $ETH earns yield, $BTC bleeds to hold
- Forced-seller overhang: $BTC has it, $ETH doesn't
- Security budget cliff: $BTC's problem, not $ETH's
- Quantum migration path: $ETH has one, $BTC doesn't
- Ship speed: $ETH every 6mo, $BTC ~never
Last cycle the loudest call was $10k $ETH. It never came. Consensus ate the L.
This cycle the loudest call is "$BTC wins, $ETH is dead" - screamed at the exact ratio where $ETH stopped going down.
Consensus will eat the L again.
@CryptoPoseidonn i heard @TrustlessState
sold at "2150"
will rebuy at 2500 (i'm sure)
and tell us he rebought at "1900" ('im sure)
and he'll be healed (ye losing some, but will win in the end)
CAN ETHEREUM RECLAIM 2021 HIGHS VS BITCOIN?
Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick is bullish on Ethereum. He says the disconnect between ETH’s strong fundamentals and weak price is temporary.
ETH has fallen 57% to ~$2,100 since August 2025, with the ETH/BTC ratio down 37%. Yet transactions and TVL remain near all-time highs.
The bank compares it to Amazon in the 2001 dot-com crash and expects ETH to catch up. It keeps its targets: $4,000 by end-2026 and $40,000 by end-2030, which would restore the ETH/BTC ratio to its 2021 peak (~0.08).
Key drivers: Ethereum’s 50-65% dominance in stablecoins and tokenized RWAs, both set for massive growth.
Yesterday, we wrapped up the Soldøgn interop: a week long core dev event focused on hardening Glamsterdam implementations to scale Ethereum securely ☀️
It was our most intense one yet. Teams used every hour of the midnight sun, ultimately converging on a 200M gas limit target after Glamsterdam, a more than 3x increase!
Soldøgn also marked the end of my tenure at the EF & L1 R&D. As announced earlier this year, I'll be exploring frontier use cases for Ethereum. I could not have asked for a better way to wrap up the past 8 years: IMO this was our best interop yet. Thank you to everyone who made it so special ❤️🔥
I’ll be offline for the next month, then back in June, kicking things off at @EthConf! Please reach out then to chat about things that only Ethereum can make possible.
Cheers 👋
Ethereum is about to fundamentally change how blocks are executed. With the upcoming Glamsterdam hardfork, it's shipping EIP-7928: Block-level Access Lists, a proposal that brings parallelization to the EVM.
Here's a short explainer of what it is, how it works, and why it's a big deal for scaling.
Let's start from the top. Alongside EIP-7732 (ePBS), EIP-7928 is the execution-layer (EL) headliner for Glamsterdam. Like ePBS, the main focus has been scaling Ethereum, though both proposals come with a bunch of other, equally important properties on the side e.g. removing trust requirements from the PBS pipeline or improving sync.
EIP-7928 adds a Block Access List (BAL) to every Ethereum block. A BAL is a list of accounts and storage slots that the block touches, but that's not all: it also contains post-transaction state diffs (this part is critical!).
Post-transaction state diffs tell you what the state looks like after each transaction. Quick example: user A swaps 1 ETH for DAI on DEX B. The BAL tells you that user A's ETH balance decreased by 1 ETH + tx fees and their nonce went up by 1; that DEX B's ETH balance went up by 1 ETH; and that inside the DAI contract, user A's DAI balance increased while DEX B's decreased.
In other words, all of that info becomes statically available, something that previously required tracing the transaction.
Client software (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth, Ethrex, Nimbus) can use this to do a few very powerful things:
1. Parallelize transaction execution. Knowing the post-state of each tx resolves the dependencies between them. No transaction has to wait on the previous one anymore, so execution can be perfectly parallelized. Instead of large parts of block validation sitting idle waiting on sequential execution, clients can finally make much better use of modern hardware.
2. Batch prefetch. One of the most cumbersome jobs for a node has been fetching the state needed for execution from disk. Because state locations (e.g. the exact storage slot in the DAI contract where user A's balance lives) are only discovered along the way, while executing, state-fetching has been a real drag on scaling: it blocks execution, takes time, and eventually slows everything down. With BALs, everything a node needs for execution is known upfront and can be loaded into cache in one go, in parallel. This speeds things up even further.
3. Parallelize post-state root calculation. Another expensive task is walking the updated state tree to compute the post-state root, which is needed so that everyone agrees on what's on disk after executing the block. With the post-tx state already in the BAL, nodes can do this in parallel while executing. A heavy task that used to wait until all transactions had finished can now run alongside prefetching and execution.
4. Snap sync (v2). An often overlooked, less sexy aspect of blockchains is syncing. Nodes need to catch up with the chain, and they need to catch up faster than the chain progresses. Today, most nodes do snap sync: downloading blocks, headers, and state in parallel while chasing the tip, and then "healing" the database once they're close to the head. Healing means asking peers for trie nodes, receiving them, validating them, and updating the local DB. It's iterative, networking-heavy, can take a while, and especially higher throughput pushes that phase to its limits. BALs help here too: with snap v2, nodes can catch up to the tip and skip the healing phase entirely. Syncing at higher throughput becomes more robust and reliable.
So, to summarize, a BAL contains two things:
-> The state locations the block accesses
-> The state changes after each tx (incl. the new values)
We're already seeing big performance gains today: on 6-core machines, EL clients validate blocks up to 5x faster, making block gas limits of 300M a very realistic outcome. ePBS will add to that by decoupling the block from the payload, giving validators 2-4x more time for execution.
To not overshoot (security stays priority #1), the fork will likely ship with a 200M gas limit, but we shouldn't be stuck there for long before pushing to 300M and beyond. That's a 10x in scaling since we started taking the topic seriously, without touching hardware requirements.
None of this would have happened without people going all-in, heads down, shipping: so many hours spent in calls debating the right design, so many iterations refining the specs, and tons of test cases written (and still being worked on). The road from whiteboard to production-ready code has been a journey, and we're not at the finish line yet, but from what I can tell, things look super bullish for Ethereum.
Glamsterdam will be a fork that shows what's possible when a distributed, decentralized community works on a shared goal, laser-focused on providing enough block space to onboard the next wave of users.