Too many people in crypto right now are either rage quitting or hoping and praying for the next pump. John Gillen thinks this is the wrong response to a big moment playing out, in the history of crypto and digital assets.
John is an ex-BlackRock VP, General Partner at TRU Capital, and host of The Milk Road Show. He's been inside the institutional world long enough to understand why the table is more set for ETH price appreciation right now than at any previous point in Ethereum's history. Here's his case:
Three major tailwinds are all in the early innings:
Stablecoin adoption is just beginning to scale globally, nearing $200B on Ethereum alone, with regulatory clarity coming soon (even if delayed) from the CLARITY Act that could accelerate adoption dramatically.
Tokenization of real world assets is moving from proof of concept to serious institutional deployment. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and others are already here, and they chose Ethereum.
The agentic economy is coming, a trillion plus new economic participants who never sleep, never eat, and are only here to generate economic value as efficiently as possible. They will follow where the pristine assets and deepest liquidity are. That's Ethereum.
All three tailwinds individually would be bullish for ETH. All three happening simultaneously, on the same network, creating compounding demand for the same asset, is something that has never happened before at this scale, in Ethereum's history.
ETH is best described as a triple point asset, and most only price in one of these.
Too many ETH valuation models have incorrectly focused on fees or network revenue. John argues ETH is simultaneously three things:
A consumable asset — every transaction on Ethereum burns ETH, and as activity scales across stablecoins, RWAs, and agentic commerce, the burn scales with it
A store of value — Ethereum's credible neutrality, censorship resistance, and 10+ year track record of producing blocks make it increasingly the neutral reserve asset of onchain finance
A capital asset — staking ETH generates a native yield without counterparty risk, compounding returns for long-term holders
So most assets are only one of these things, but ETH is all three simultaneously. This is part of the reason teams like Etherealize and Ethlabs have been stood up, to better communicate the value of ETH to Wall Street and institutional investors, plus help integrate Ethereum’s technology with TradFi.
Decentralized AI makes the case for ETH more urgent than ever:
When the US government placed export controls on frontier AI models, it was a wake up call. Major corporations and nation states realized that building on centralized AI infrastructure means the government can take it away with a decree. Open source, censorship-resistant, permissionless infrastructure, exactly what Ethereum provides, suddenly became strategically necessary for anyone building serious AI applications.
Crypto pioneering builder Erik Voorhees has been very vocal about the need for decentralized AI and why Ethereum's value proposition is more important, not less, in an AI-dominated world.
The institutional bull market is invisible to retail:
John spent years at BlackRock and sees what's happening behind closed doors. The largest institutional bull market in crypto history is underway, but it doesn't show up in retail sentiment or token prices yet. Institutions still move relatively slowly and quietly so that by the time we as retail notice, the positioning is already done.
"Can't be evil" vs "Don't be evil":
Google's motto was once famously "don't be evil." Ethereum's ought to be "can't be evil." All of finance is downstream of faith and Ethereum offers a higher form of faith than any legacy system. Not trust-me-bro faith, it is truth, “instantiated by ETH the asset” according to John, and enforced by code rather than human promises.
The bottom line:
John's ETH price outlook is “directionally much higher,” as he references $40K by 2030 from Standard Chartered's Global Head of Digital Assets Research, Geoff Kendrick. John expects $5,000 to become a new floor price for ETH sooner than later. But more than any specific number, his argument is that this is exactly the moment to lean in rather than check out. Not because number go up, but because what's being built is genuinely important and genuinely underpriced relative to what it's becoming.
Wartime Ethereum isn't about fighting competitors. It's about showing up for something worth believing in.
Listen to the latest The Edge Podcast for the full breakdown of wartime Ethereum!
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DISCLAIMER: Nothing said on The Edge Podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell tokens or securities. This content is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing shared here is financial advice. Any views expressed by hosts or guests on the show are solely their opinions. Always do your own research. DeFi Dad, Nomatic, and guests may have positions in the assets or other matters discussed in this podcast. DeFi Dad, Nomatic, and John all hold ETH.
