Andrew Keys, the co-founder of the new Ethereum investment firm The Ether Machine, argues investors would have made much more money investing in Ether (ETH) than Bitcoin (BTC) a decade ago.
“The price of Ether per Bitcoin over the past decade has materially improved. Over the last decade, since Ethereum started, you would be 50x wealthier [had you owned it since then],” Keys said on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday while talking about his new Ethereum treasury firm, which plans to go public.
In a post on X, he later corrected the price growth figure from 50 times to 30 times.
Keys serves as chairman of the new company, which plans to launch with more than 400,000 ETH, currently worth around $1.5 billion, making it the largest public vehicle for institutional Ethereum exposure.
This would eclipse the current holdings of Bitmine and SharpLink, which have 300,000 and 280,000 in their ETH treasuries, respectively.
Keys told CNBC that he is an “Ethereum guy” and does not own Bitcoin. “I’d rather have an iPhone than a landline,” he said.
Keys also said that “the largest beneficiary of the GENIUS Act is Ethereum,” because the majority of stablecoins are deployed on Ethereum.
“Ethereum is experiencing power law dynamics where 90% of tokenized assets are deployed on Ethereum, similar to the power law dynamics of Google where 90% of searches happen with Google.”
A flawed comparison
While the figures comparing Ether and Bitcoin returns over time aren’t inaccurate, they also paint an incomplete picture of the two assets’ meteoric gains since inception.
The Bitcoin network was created in 2009, and one of the earliest indicators of its price was on the now infamous Pizza Day in May 2010, when one BTC was worth about $0.0041; however, it was not listed on exchanges for trading at the time.
The asset was priced around $0.05 when it first traded on the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange in July 2010. It has since gained in value by more than 234 million percent.
Meanwhile, Ethereum’s genesis block came more than six years later, in July 2015, when Bitcoin was already trading at $280.
Ether traded at around $1.60 on average in the month following its genesis and has gained 236,837% since then.
Related: Ethereum investors pile into ETH amid massive weekly surge
Recent performance could also add a new dimension to the argument.
Ether has yet to reach a new all-time high this cycle and remains down 23% from its 2021 peak price of $4,878, trading largely sideways since 2022.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin notched a new all-time high on July 14 and has gained 78% since its 2021 cycle peak.
Ether Machine plans IPO
The Ether Reserve is a new investment firm focused on Ethereum and plans to go public on the Nasdaq with over $1.6 billion in backing.
The launch will be through a merger with blank-check (SPAC) company Dynamix Corporation, with a combined entity called “The Ether Machine,” reported Reuters.
Rotation into Ether
“Investors are rotating into Ethereum en masse, which explains its sustained rally over the weekend,” Jeff Mei, chief operating officer at the BTSE exchange, told Cointelegraph on Tuesday.
He added that it was clear that momentum has shifted toward Ether, which “makes sense as Ethereum is still trading well below its all-time highs and traders believe it will close the gap in the coming months.”
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