Wartime Ethereum

Gillen’s core call is directional, not a price target: he reports Jeff Kendrick’s view that ETH reaches $40,000 by 2030, but says he is not hung up on predictions. His own expectation is that ETH resolves “somewhere above $5,000” in the relatively near term; he adds, “This is not financial advice… I don’t know whether that’s going to happen.” The thesis stays live because stablecoins, RWA tokenization, and the agentic economy are all “just beginning to take off”; if Ethereum had already lost that market share, “I would have a different view of this.”

His rebuttal to David Hoffman’s ETH sale is the episode’s intellectual spine: “All of finance is downstream of faith. The whole system is based on faith. And Ethereum’s chief product is faith” — not trust-me-bro faith, but truth. The addressable market he attaches to that: ~$700 trillion of assets, with FX swaps alone doing $5–9 trillion of daily volume, all seeking a credibly neutral settlement layer — and ex-Bitcoin, ~80% of crypto capital already sits in the Ethereum ecosystem.

From his BlackRock vantage, “Wall Street absolutely gets it” — the fight is banks defending custody, not institutions doubting the tech. Asset managers as fiduciaries will use the best rails; banks like BNY Mellon with “over $50 trillion of assets under custody” are building their own consortiums instead, because “if you have $50 trillion under custody, you can fight it pretty hard in a lot of very creative ways.” Still: “the genie is not going back in the bottle.”

He flags “the largest institutional bull run in the history of digital assets at the same time that retail investors are checking out” — a bullish divergence but also a “troubling and worrisome gulf.” His worry is retail missing “the ground floor of the next century of finance” while speculative capital rotates through the “hot ball of money”; his posture is to endure 50% drawdowns with equanimity, while staying patient because “the money is made in the waiting.”

He has soured on the Clarity Act: it has been “gerrymandered” into “more of a bill to protect the banks than to help the digital asset space,” and a hostile future administration could turn it into “a quagmire, a Trojan horse.” He’s “not optimistic that this comes through anymore”; DeFi Dad notes Polymarket odds of 2026 passage have fallen to 43% from 75–80%.

The EF downsizing plus ETH Labs is, in his telling, “one of the most bullish moments we’ve seen in Ethereum’s recent history.” Gillen estimates BitMine and SharpLink together have roughly 7% of ETH supply and generate $400–500M a year in staking rewards; he describes their move as beginning to use some of that capital for ecosystem growth — potentially providing “a strategy not just for the success of Ethereum the network but for the success of the asset.”

The export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5 are framed as AI’s Russia-SWIFT moment: once a government demonstrates willingness, not just capacity, to restrict or take away a technology, everyone starts pricing the need for a censorship-resistant alternative. With open-source models lagging frontier models by ~6 months and Aschenbrenner arguing AGI could be nationalized, Ethereum is “top of the pile” for decentralized builders and users seeking a “trustless state” and a long-term call option.

🔗 Original source & video: Wartime Ethereum: The Case For ETH Going Much Higher