According to The Block, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan stated in a memo sent to clients on Tuesday that "no one likes Ethereum" in the current market because the ETH/BTC exchange rate has recently fallen below a three-year low. However, Matt Hougan believes that this actually provides a potential contrarian investment opportunity for the end of the year.

No one likes Ethereum

Despite the poor performance of the overall cryptocurrency market in the past six months, Bitcoin still rose 42% in 2024, Solana rose 27%, and Ethereum only rose 1% in comparison. Matt Hougan stated that the sentiment of the Ethereum community is very low, and the main issues causing this situation include the risk of the US election, intensified competition from Solana, token economy challenges, and poor performance of spot ETFs.

Although the United States approved an Ethereum spot ETF in July, Matt Hougan pointed out that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) still considers staking Ethereum as a security. If He Jinli wins the November election and continues the Biden administration's skepticism towards cryptocurrencies, Matt Hougan believes that Ethereum may continue to face regulatory challenges.

In addition, the performance of Ethereum spot ETFs, including Bitwise's ETHW fund, has also fallen short of expectations. The newly launched fund attracted a net inflow of $2.1 billion, but the Grayscale ETF (ETHE) experienced a net outflow of $2.8 billion, indicating that overall funds are still flowing out.

Matt Hougan also pointed out that the rise of emerging public chains such as Solana has made competition even more intense:

Nowadays, the bullish sentiment towards new chains such as Solana is very popular in the cryptocurrency circle, while the bearish sentiment towards Ethereum is gradually increasing due to the older technology and higher cost

Finally, Matt Hougan emphasized that Ethereum is focused on driving the growth of transaction volume on the Layer 2 network, which has led to the lowest revenue for the underlying chain in four years. Many people have also begun to question whether Ethereum has harmed the development of its underlying Layer 1 by excessively promoting the expansion of Layer 2.

Investment opportunities against the trend

Although these challenges have affected market sentiment and prices, Matt Hougan believes they have overlooked a very important point.

It's cool to hate Ethereum now. I bet it will eventually look foolish

Although both Ethereum and Solana are attempting to become "public computers" for decentralized applications, almost all of the applications that have truly achieved "breakthrough success" are dominated by Ethereum, have the most active developers and users, over half of stablecoins are issued on Ethereum, over 60% of DeFi assets are locked onto Ethereum, and Ethereum is still the preferred settlement layer for prediction platform Polymarket. In addition, BlackRock's on chain US bond funds with asset management scale exceeding $500 million and Nike's NFT platform are also based on Ethereum, and these achievements are difficult to ignore.

Matt Hougan said:

Ethereum is like Microsoft in the memory blockchain industry. Everyone is talking about Google, Slack, and Zoom, which makes sense because they bring transformative technologies. But Microsoft's scale still exceeds their total

Although he is not bearish on Solana or other emerging chains, Matt Hougan believes that too many people have overlooked the tremendous success that Ethereum has already achieved.

The challenges of Ethereum are not fatal, but its opportunities are full of potential. I believe that as we approach the November election and the clarity of relevant regulatory policies, the market may re evaluate Ethereum. From the current perspective, Ethereum looks like a potential contrarian investment opportunity before the end of the year, "he concluded.