Despite being roughly five times smaller than Bitcoin at the moment, FundStrat head of research Tom Lee believes Ethereum is poised to overtake the flagship cryptocurrency — similarly to how US equities surpassed gold 54 years ago.
“Ethereum could flip Bitcoin similar to how Wall Street and equities flipped gold post ’71,” Lee told ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood on Thursday.
According to CoinGecko data, Bitcoin’s current market cap is $2.11 trillion, 4.6 times bigger than Ethereum’s $456.5 billion.
### Why Ether Could Challenge Bitcoin’s Throne
Countless altcoins have come and gone, and many others are still in existence. Yet, Bitcoin remains the most popular and most valued cryptocurrency. Since its launch in 2015, Ethereum has always played second fiddle to Bitcoin.
But could it one day flip BTC to become the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency? That’s the position of Tom Lee, the chairman of Ethereum treasury firm Bitmine Immersion, who believes Ethereum could skyrocket in the same way the United States dollar rose to dominance after President Richard Nixon made the greenback “fully synthetic” and eliminated the gold standard.
According to Lee, when that happened, “the immediate beneficiary was demand and a market to own gold.” Wall Street responded by introducing products that made the dollar dominant, with the market cap of stocks reaching a whopping $40 trillion, compared to gold’s $2 trillion.
“Dollar dominance is going to be the opportunity of Ethereum,” he opined, adding this will be because of “everything becoming tokenized.”
“So as we move dollars onto the blockchain, which is stablecoins, we’ll move stocks and real estate,” Lee observed.
Still, he stressed that it is just a “working theory” and that he remains a Bitcoin bull.
At the time of writing, Ether is trading at about $3,824 as the cryptocurrency market extended its losses on Friday. The sell-off dragged the total crypto market cap down by 5.3% to $3.6 trillion, its lowest level since July, CoinGecko data shows.
https://zycrypto.com/ethereum-could-surpass-bitcoin-akin-to-how-wall-street-flipped-gold-says-fundstrats-tom-lee/
