Wartime Ethereum: The Case For ETH Going Much Higher

John Gillan, author of the Wartime Ethereum series and a former six-year BlackRock employee who worked on the Aladdin platform and helped integrate Coinbase with Aladdin, frames Wartime Ethereum not primarily as a price call but as a call for sustained engagement with what is being built in the Ethereum ecosystem beyond speculation. He left BlackRock in February 2025 and now consults in digital assets, advises family offices and VC firms, and founded True Capital Fund, which does direct investment in digital assets using institutional-grade algorithms.

Approximately 80 percent of capital in the digital asset space outside of Bitcoin sits in the Ethereum ecosystem in some form, and the majority of DeFi liquidity lives on Ethereum rather than being distributed across a multi-chain universe. Ethereum has ten years of uptime with no downtime and no failures during network upgrades, a record contrasted with SUI, which paused four times in a short period despite having one of the best teams in digital assets. Stablecoins on Ethereum stand at approximately 160 billion dollars out of roughly 300 billion dollars total across all chains, and usage continues to make new highs.

Ethereum's credible neutrality is described as censorship-resistant, open, permissionless, secure, and scalable global financial and monetary infrastructure, which traditional finance would call minimization of counterparty risk. The Ethereum Foundation owns approximately 0.16 percent of total ETH supply while Vitalik holds 90 percent of his personal wealth in ETH, a combination described as the ideal balance of personal commitment and decentralization. ETH the asset is described as instantiating the trust and credible neutrality the network offers, and the burn mechanism ties economic activity directly to ETH asset value, making price appreciation a function of a functioning economy rather than speculation alone. If ETH were valued solely on layer one transaction fees it would be worth approximately 30 dollars, but Bitcoin is not valued on transaction fees and that example is used to argue Ethereum's monetary premium is similarly valid.

The addressable market of global assets is approximately 700 trillion dollars, and FX swaps alone generate roughly 5 to 9 trillion dollars of intraday volume every day. Current financial infrastructure is described as resembling a Rube Goldberg machine of nine different systems that can take 30 days to settle and requires large amounts of capital tied up as collateral, with significant private credit still managed on Excel sheets emailed back and forth. Banks such as JP Morgan and Bank of New York Mellon, which has over 50 trillion dollars of assets under custody, are described as resistant to public blockchains because their business model depends on custody and control, and their resources give them significant capacity to fight public blockchain adoption in creative and political ways. Asset managers, by contrast, have a fiduciary obligation and are described as more open to using whatever system best serves clients.

The largest institutional bull run in digital asset history is occurring simultaneously with retail sentiment at some of the lowest levels the speakers have observed. Wall Street is hiring rapidly and relocating resources for crypto and tokenization at what the speakers describe as breakneck speed by Wall Street standards, and the SEC chairman has stated a goal of tokenizing everything within two years. ETH Labs, backed by Bitmine and Sharplink with Haseeb of Dragonfly Capital also participating, holds approximately seven percent of Ethereum's total supply and generates approximately 400 to 500 million dollars per year in staking rewards. The speakers view the emergence of ETH Labs as one of the most bullish moments in Ethereum's recent history.

Polymarket odds for crypto legislation passing within 2026 have fallen to 43 percent after previously reaching as high as 75 to 80 percent. The speakers express significant misgivings about the Clarity Act in its current form, arguing it has been reshaped away from protecting DeFi developers and toward protecting banks, and warn that vaguely written legislation can be weaponized by a future hostile executive branch. If Congress recesses without passing the Clarity Act, the next opportunity for digital asset legislation could be as far out as 2030 or later. The US government's favorable stance on dollar-denominated stablecoins as a tool for enforcing dollar dominance is described as a major regulatory tailwind regardless of legislative outcome.

The US freezing Russian assets and removing Russia from the SWIFT system accelerated demand for censorship-resistant infrastructure, and US export controls on frontier AI models are driving awareness of the importance of open-source AI. Eric Voorhees building Venice on Ethereum and describing it as the obvious choice is cited as evidence of demand for decentralized AI infrastructure. A trillion-plus new agentic economic participants are expected to enter the landscape and use Ethereum or EVM ecosystem tools, with stablecoin adoption, real-world asset tokenization, and the agentic economy all described as early innings. The thesis would need to be reconsidered if tokenization of the estimated 700 trillion dollars in global assets landed primarily on Sui, Solana, or another chain instead. David Hoffman's position that ETH has received the price it deserves and will not be repriced higher is explicitly rejected. One speaker predicted ETH will resolve in the relatively near term somewhere above 5,000 dollars, while Jeff Kendrick stated in a prior interview on the same channel that Ethereum will reach 40,000 dollars by 2030.