Ethereum has rallied to more than $3,800 this week, gaining roughly 60% over the past month, according to data provider CoinGecko—a sign that “ETH season” is finally nigh.
But as the altcoin rises from the doldrums, one question remains foremost for the token’s holders: Will this ETH revival last?
Jeff Garzik, an early Bitcoin programmer who worked on the blockchain alongside its creator Satoshi Nakamoto more than a decade ago, said Ethereum and its native token will thrive, largely due to the usefulness and ubiquity of its technology.
“I’m not bearish on Ethereum because everybody is building on EVM,” Garzik told Decrypt, referring to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, a decentralized computation engine that executes smart contracts on the Ethereum network.
The Bitcoin OG’s endorsement of Ethereum comes as the layer-1 appears to recover from a crisis of confidence that coincided with ETH’s plunge to $1,410 on April 7— its lowest price since March 2023.
The Ethereum Foundation also underwent leadership changes earlier this year amid fears the layer-1 was losing ground to rival blockchains such as Solana, with some investors raising concerns over the Foundation’s roadmap for the project.
But Ethereum’s fortunes have improved recently. ETH sailed to $3,844 on July 21 and popped even higher earlier Sunday, and has remained roughly $1,000 below its all-time high of $4,878 set in November 2021, according to CoinGecko, buoyed by institutional and corporate investments into the altcoin.
Spot Ethereum ETFs notched $2.12 billion worth of inflows the week before last, nearly doubling their previous record, according to Farside Investors data—and then flipped Bitcoin ETF flows last week.
Meanwhile, a spate of Ethereum treasury companies—including Bitmine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink—have added billions of dollars in ETH to their coffers over the past few weeks.
However, Garzik believes it is Ethereum’s technological contributions—not recent investor interest in its token—that signal the project’s chances for long-term success. Garzik has tapped the EVM tech for Hemi Network, a layer-2 network that is compatible with both Bitcoin and Ethereum, that launched its mainnet in March.
“I look at it maybe from a different perspective than price,” the developer said. “What’s going to be here 10 years from now, 20 years from now? I think it’s unquestionably Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
Declining to offer a price prediction for ETH, Garzik noted that much of the crypto ecosystem is largely undergirded by Ethereum’s technology.
“The default choice for programmability…[and] for smart contracts is to be building on Ethereum tech,” the developer said. “Everybody wants to, whether it’s an L1 or an L2.”
EVM is used across many popular blockchains, including Avalanche, Polygon, and Arbitrum.
Asked about so-called Ethereum killers such as Solana, Sui, and Aptos, which use their own nodes and programming languages instead of the EVM, Garzik said: “You’ve got a lot of people saying, ‘I’ve got this latest whizbang technology. It’s gonna smoke Ethereum, [and] Ethereum is like yesterday’s news.’ [But] none of them have time in the market.”
Speaking about the rivalry between newer blockchains and Ethereum, Garzik recalled a joke about Microsoft and the browser wars in the late 1990s.
“The joke goes, if Microsoft made a car, it’d go 1000 miles an hour, it’d randomly crash, turn left, and explode when you least expect it,” he said. “Some of the newer blockchains are like that.”
