Written by: Jessy, Climber, Golden Finance
On July 23rd, Beijing time, the U.S. SEC officially announced that Ethereum spot ETF products can be listed for trading, which is undoubtedly a historic and glorious moment for Ethereum.
Yesterday was also the tenth anniversary of Ethereum’s official ICO financing. Along the way, Ethereum has continued to prove its value. After years of regulatory resistance and countless revised registration documents, the 19 b-4 form of the spot Ethereum ETF was approved in May this year, but it still needs its S-1 registration statement to take effect before it can officially start trading. Two months later, the spot Ethereum ETF finally entered the market and became the representative of cryptocurrency after Bitcoin.
The official approval for listing and trading also directly proves that Ethereum is worthy of the reputation of "the king of all chains". After ten years of hard work, we might as well re-understand Ethereum and explore the true value of this "world computer" that has been questioned and controversial, as well as the impact of the approval of the Ethereum spot ETF on the development of the entire crypto industry.
1. The past and present of Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain platform with smart contract capabilities. ETH is the platform’s native cryptocurrency and the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after Bitcoin. At the time of writing, its market capitalization is approximately $420 billion.
Ethereum is a programmable blockchain network, and ETH is the token that drives this network. Bitcoin is the first killer application of blockchain, but due to the lack of programmability, it is difficult to extend more functions beyond the function of value storage. As an early researcher of Bitcoin, Vitalik Buterin hopes to support more decentralized applications based on blockchain network programming, so Ethereum came into being.
Major Events:
2013
At the end of 2013, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin released the first version of the Ethereum white paper, and gradually gathered a group of developers who recognized the concept of Ethereum in the global cryptocurrency community and launched the project.
From December 2013 to January 2014, the focus of Ethereum's work was on how to launch the vision described by Vitalik in the Ethereum white paper. The team finally agreed that the Genesis pre-sale was a good idea. After a long and multi-faceted discussion, in order to create a suitable infrastructure and legal strategy, the team decided to postpone the Ethereum pre-sale originally scheduled for February 2014.
2014
February 2014 was a very important month for Ethereum, with rapid progress in all aspects of Ethereum: community growth, code writing, wiki content writing, business infrastructure and legal strategy. In this month, Vitalik first announced the Ethereum project at the Miami Bitcoin Conference, held the first "Ask Us Anything" event on Reddit, and the core development team became a world-class cryptocurrency team.
In July 2014, Ethereum conducted a 42-day pre-sale of ether, raising a total of 31,531 bitcoins, which was equivalent to $18.43 million based on the bitcoin price at the time, making it the second largest crowdfunding project at the time. The final number of ethers sold was 60,102,216.
2015
In March 2015, the team released a series of statements about the release of the Genesis block. In May, the team released the last test network (POC9), codenamed Olympic. In order to better test the network, during the Olympic phase, members who participated in the test network will receive Ethereum rewards from the team. There are many forms of rewards, mainly including test mining rewards and bug submission rewards.
In July 2015, the official Ethereum network was released, which also marked the official operation of the Ethereum blockchain.
2016
On March 14, 2016 (Pi Day), Ethereum launched the Homestead phase. In this phase, Ethereum provided a graphical wallet, and the usability was greatly improved. Ethereum was no longer exclusive to developers, and ordinary users could also easily experience and use Ethereum.
2017
On March 1, 2017, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) was announced, aiming to create an enterprise-level blockchain solution and jointly develop industry standards.
In July 2017, hackers used unauthorized function calls to exploit vulnerabilities in Parity wallet 1.5 or later, launching attacks and stealing more than 150,000 ether from three multi-signature contracts, causing a loss of about $30 million based on the market value at the time. In November, due to a code vulnerability accidentally triggered by "misoperation" by developers and users, all Parity multi-signature wallets that were repaired and created after July 20 were paralyzed, resulting in a total of 930,000 ether worth more than $154 million being frozen and locked, and have not been recovered to date.
2018
In September 2018, Bitcoin core developer Jeremy Rubin published an article titled "The Collapse of ETH is Inevitable" on TechCrunch, an American technology media, saying that even if the Ethereum network continues to exist, the value of ETH will inevitably return to zero. Ethereum founder Vitalik acknowledged the existence of the problem in his response: "If Ethereum does not change, Jeremy Rubin's remarks may be correct." This remark caused the price of ETH to fall for a time. At the same time, many Ethereum projects began to move to other public chains such as EOS and TRON, and some people worried that Ethereum would be replaced. Under the influence of ETH's price, Ethereum's total network computing power began to shrink. According to the computing power statistics of etherscan.io, the total network computing power of Ethereum fell by 20% from September to November, shrinking from nearly 300TH/s to 240TH/s.
On December 10, 2018, Vitalik claimed on Twitter that future blockchains that adopt sharding technology based on proof of stake (PoS) "will be thousands of times more efficient."
2019
In 2019, the Ethereum project carried out Constantinople hard fork, which is a code that stimulates the Ethereum network to change its core consensus mechanism algorithm. After this code is activated, Ethereum will face the so-called "Ice Age", and the difficulty of creating new blocks on the network will continue to increase, and eventually slow down to a complete stop. After the hard fork upgrade, the state of the Ethereum blockchain will be "permanently" changed.
2020
Beacon chain genesis block. The beacon chain requires 16,384 accounts storing 32 staked ether to ensure a safe launch. This happened on November 27, 2020, meaning the beacon chain started producing blocks on December 1, 2020. This is an important first step in realizing Ethereum’s vision.
2021
April 15, Berlin upgrade. The Berlin upgrade optimizes the fuel costs of certain Ethereum virtual machine operations and adds support for multiple transaction types.
On August 5, the London upgrade introduced EIP-1559(opens in a new tab), which reformed the transaction fee market, while also making changes to the refund processing of gas fees and the Ice Age schedule.
October 27th, Aquila upgrade. The Aquila upgrade is the first planned beacon chain upgrade. It adds support for "sync committees" — support for light clients, and increases penalties for validator laziness and slashable behavior as it progresses toward a merge.
On December 9, the Arrow Glacier network upgrade delayed the difficulty bomb by several months. This was the only change introduced in this upgrade, which was similar in nature to the Muir Glacier upgrade. Similar changes were made in the Byzantium, Constantinople, and London network upgrades.
2022
On September 6th, Bellatrix upgrade. The Bellatrix upgrade is the second planned beacon chain upgrade that prepares the beacon chain for the merge. It increases the penalty for validators for inactivity and slashable behavior to its full value.
September 15, Paris upgrade (merge). The Paris upgrade is a merge transition, the main function of Ethereum ends the proof-of-work mining algorithm and related consensus logic and starts proof-of-stake.
2023
On April 12, the Shanghai upgrade introduced stake withdrawals to the execution layer. The Shanghai upgrade was carried out at the same time as the Capella upgrade, enabling blocks to accept withdrawal operations, so stakers can withdraw ether from the beacon chain to the execution layer.
2024
In March, the Cancun upgrade. Deneb is the upgrade name of the Ethereum consensus layer (CL), while Cancun refers to the update of the Ethereum execution layer (EL).
2. The peak and valley of ETH price
ETH's price of nearly $4,000 and its achievement of becoming the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization were not achieved in a day. From the Ethereum price chart below, we can intuitively see its glory and dark periods.
From the historical price trend chart of ETH, we can see that it has experienced several bull-bear conversion cycles, and this second-ranked cryptocurrency has also experienced a period of deep price decline, for which it has been questioned by the market.
In January 2018, ETH reached its first historical high, with a price of about $1,300. Just one year ago, ETH was only around $10, a 130-fold increase during this period.
But the subsequent bear market caused ETH to drop to as low as $100, a drop of more than 90%. This also made people doubt whether the Ethereum project really has huge value.
With the arrival of the historic bull market in the crypto market in 2021, ETH has continuously set new price records, rising to about $3,900 in May and around $4,900 in November. The highest point is about 49 times higher than the lowest point in the previous bear market.
However, with the advent of the bear market and the subsequent collapse of Terra and FTX, ETH fell from its highs again, falling to around $1,000. This period of silence did not improve until October 2023.
With the expected approval of the US Bitcoin spot ETF, the crypto market has recovered and ETH has also risen. However, ETH's performance in this cycle has disappointed investors. Not only did it fail to follow the footsteps of its big brother BTC to set new highs, but its growth rate was also far behind that of similar public chains. On the other hand, Solana has been reborn from the ashes, with the price rising from around $20 to $210, almost recovering the losses in the bear market.
Entering 2024, ETH has twice tested $4,000, but the upward trend is weak. However, this stalemate is expected to be broken with the approval of the Ethereum spot ETF.
3. Where is the price of Ethereum going?
The approval and launch of the Ethereum spot ETF indicates that the era of crypto integration into the mainstream has arrived.
From the market perspective, the most direct benefit of the ETF is ETH itself.
There are different views on the market regarding market expectations. The current price of Ethereum has exceeded US$3,500. After the spot ETF is approved and launched, will it continue to rise?
One view is that the price trend after the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF can be used as a reference for the BTC spot ETF, which saw a small drop followed by a sharp rise.
The Bitcoin ETF was fully approved on January 10th, and in the lead-up to its launch, we saw a strong rally in BTC prices to $49,000 before falling 21% to $38,500 over the next 12 days. Since then, traders have seen bullish daily cumulative inflows into the 10 BTC spot ETFs (excluding Grayscale) and bought aggressively, ultimately leading to a 90% rally in BTC to $73,000.
Copycat, so it is a view that the price will fall first and then rise. There are several arguments to support this view:
First, the increase in ETH this round is not much. The price of 3,500 US dollars is only about three times the bottom, while Bitcoin has increased four to five times after the spot ETF was approved. It is generally believed in the industry that the price of ETH has been suppressed for too long in this round.
However, the possibility of the same price action happening again in ETH is clearly a risk, and when everyone expects this to happen, it often doesn’t actually happen, or at least the pullback should be much shallower.
The fundamental reason that supports the continuous rise in Ethereum prices is that the Ethereum spot ETF can attract a large amount of institutional capital inflows.
If a large amount of funds flow in, then the rule in investment that "good news coming true" is bad news will not hold true.
Spot Ethereum ETFs may not attract as much investor enthusiasm as spot Bitcoin ETFs For ETFs that target traditional institutions such as pensions, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds, Ethereum is not popular. The reason may be that the institutional market holdings of Ethereum itself are smaller than Bitcoin. In the US market, ETH futures ETFs only account for about 5% of BTC futures ETF assets. Of course, this does not represent the possible demand for spot ETH ETFs.
Outside the United States, both Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded products (ETPs) are listed, with assets in Ethereum ETPs accounting for approximately 25%-30% of Bitcoin ETP assets. Comparing the asset share of ETFs, Grayscale Research predicts that net inflows into U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs will reach 25%-30% of net inflows into spot Bitcoin ETFs; or approximately $3.5 billion to $4 billion in inflows in the first four months or so (accounting for 25%-30% of the net inflows of $13.7 billion into spot Bitcoin ETFs since January).
In general, the estimated demand for the US spot Ethereum ETF is about 25%-30% of the demand for the spot Bitcoin ETF. The market value of Ethereum is about one-third of that of Bitcoin. Calculated by market value, every $1 inflow into the spot Ethereum ETF may have a greater comparable impact on the price. However, if the estimated amount of funds flowing in is one-third of that of the Bitcoin spot ETF, then in general, after the launch of the Ethereum spot ETF, its general price trend and increase will actually be similar to that of Bitcoin.
However, when everyone expects that the price of Ethereum will fall first and then rise, the price of Ethereum may not fall much, especially after the price falls due to favorable macroeconomic expectations such as the US election and interest rate cuts. Instead, everyone will hold on to the currency and wait to sell.
There is also a view that Ethereum can no longer rise, and the current price has basically reached its stage top.
From a valuation perspective, Ethereum is arguably more valuable than Bitcoin was when the spot Bitcoin ETF launched in January. For example, one popular valuation metric is the MVRV z-score. This metric is based on the ratio of a token’s total market capitalization to its “realized value”: its market capitalization based on the price at which a token last moved on-chain (as opposed to the price at which it trades on an exchange). When the spot Bitcoin ETF launched in January, its MVRV z-score was relatively low, suggesting that valuations were modest and that there could be more room for price appreciation. Since then, the crypto market has appreciated, and the MVRV ratios of both Bitcoin and Ethereum have increased. This may indicate that there is less room for price appreciation once the spot ETH ETF is approved to go live than there was when the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF was approved in January.
4. The impact of Ethereum spot ETF approval on industry development
Why was the Ethereum spot ETF suddenly passed? One of the biggest reasons is that it was influenced by the two-party election in the United States and the shift in the two parties’ attitudes towards encryption.
On May 22 of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the 21st Century Financial Innovation and Technology Act (“FIT21”). This is a landmark legislation for the crypto market. The bill aims to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets. The bill received bipartisan support, receiving 279 votes in favor (67%). This event also shows that cryptocurrency is becoming more and more important in the political landscape, and the attitudes of both parties towards encryption have undoubtedly turned to support. The two parties quickly turned to support cryptocurrency, and the most direct promotion was the SEC’s approval of the Ethereum spot ETF.
A common understanding in the industry is that since POS Ethereum has passed the spot ETF, the next SOL spot ETF also has a chance. After all, some institutions have submitted applications for SOL spot ETFs to the SEC.
What will follow is the launch of more spot ETFs for cryptocurrencies. People will begin to anticipate the approval of spot ETFs such as AVAX, PEPE, and DOGE. Even if SOL has been designated as a security by the SEC, it does not matter. The cryptocurrency circle relies on hype based on emotions and expectations.
On the other hand, even if it is defined as a security, is it possible that the spot ETF will not be approved?
Whether Ethereum is a security has always been a hot topic in cryptocurrency legal discussions. In June of this year, the SEC concluded its investigation into Ethereum 2.0, which means that the SEC will not bring charges that ETH sales constitute securities transactions.
When the SEC approves an Ethereum spot ETF, it will have to explicitly acknowledge that non-collateralized ETH is not a security. This will be a major policy move by the SEC, which has previously refused to recognize any asset other than Bitcoin as a non-security commodity.
This move will also immediately affect the SEC’s cases against major cryptocurrency exchanges. If Ethereum is not considered a security, then many other tokens may also be identified as commodities using similar logic, allowing cryptocurrency exchanges to win these legal cases.
After the Ethereum spot ETF goes online, the crypto industry may usher in a big explosion in the altcoin season. The previous market cycle development pattern is generally that Bitcoin rises first, and then Ethereum rises. As the leader of the altcoins, Ethereum has driven the altcoins to soar.
The logic behind this round of bull market is that after the Ethereum spot ETF is approved, more and more virtual currencies or mixed virtual currency ETFs will enter the market, and BlackRock and similar institutions will issue crypto index products, which will greatly promote the liquidity of the crypto market.
From the above, it can be seen that the launch of the Ethereum spot ETF is a top-down benefit in terms of encryption policy, and the policy benefits will bring about a comprehensive embrace of capital, which will embrace not only Ethereum, but perhaps also a large number of altcoins.
Summarize
Looking back on the long road to building Ethereum’s ETF, it was full of difficulties and obstacles. From being questioned by the market to being accepted by the U.S. SEC and becoming one of the mainstream products in the traditional financial market, Ethereum’s success has once again proved that the crypto market has an infinitely bright prospect and future.
The current stagnation of ETH prices is only a temporary market reaction, and the value of Ethereum will eventually be proven with the blessing of long-termism. But the real significance lies in the fact that the recognition of the US regulatory level will also leave a sign and seed of hope for other altcoins to embark on the ETF path of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
