John Gillen: Ethereum Will Fly From Here And Most Investors Aren't Ready (Here's Why)

**Andy** (0:00)
All right, you guys, we're here in Ticket Station Tower with John Gillen. John, great to have you. I love the suit, looks great. For those of you guys who don't know, John is one of the hosts of Milk Road Daily Show. It's one of my favorite crypto pods. They get some of the best guests in the industry.
I love their thumbnails, I love the whole vibe. John is ex-BlackRock, very smart guy, very bullish ETH.
And yeah, I mean, we, I was a big fan of your pieces that you put out. You put out the pieces about Wartime Ethereum, situational awareness, and now about this short squeeze. So talk to us about what is going on in the land of Ethereum. What's got you so bulled up?

**John Gillen** (0:38)
Well, a lot's going on. It's great to be here, Andy. Thanks for having me, a big fan of your show too.
So this all started for a long time. I have been a follower of a lot of different content outlets and media outlets and digital assets. Bankless has always been one of my favorite. And one of the co-hosts of Bankless, David Hoffman, publicly sold his ETH and wrote an essay called Why I Sold My ETH. And there wasn't anything specific to David about this, but it was a bear market, the vibes were down, and everybody was just rage quitting. And in general, I don't know, it just felt like a time for a rallying cry and a call to action.
So Wartime Ethereum was an article that I wrote in response to David's article about why I sold my ETH. And I was basically just saying that I think it's too early to call on this. He was saying that Ethereum has reached this vague middle ground where it's gonna stay in this area for a while and not really re-rate in price higher or lower. And I think Ethereum is either worth like 20 bucks or it's one of the most valuable assets in the world. So I wrote an essay saying like it's too soon to call on this. It's just bear market rage and frustration. It has been in a downtrend against Bitcoin for like nine years. And I don't know, somebody had to like pound the table and say, I still believe in this. I believe in something. I believe in ETH. And so that's how it started. And then like I kept having more every couple of months, I would have like more to say or like, you know, things would happen in the market that I felt bared additional commentary. And so the most recent one I wrote, Wartime Ethereum Blitzkrieg was about this massive short squeeze that we saw in Bitcoin and Ethereum and across the digital asset space that seems to have catalyzed us out of the bear market. It's been almost a month since that happened. And the price action is holding. So the momentum is going in a good direction. It's nice to see this kind of turn around. It's been nice to see the community really respond to those articles because I think there's a lot of people who are feeling these things and articulating them. I think it resonates with a lot of people. I was just happy to see that.

**Andy** (2:24)
Man, I put out a tweet today that was like nobody owns Ethereum.
How did we get here? How did we get to a place where the number two crypto asset is not owned by people in the industry themselves? And I've been kind of working a scoop, John, that is whether the Clarity Act passes or not, I don't really have specific intel there. I'm hearing that it's been dead since July is what it is, right? There's, you know, the Polymarket's got it at 15% chance this year.
But what I do have scoop on is that there's an innovation exemption for tokenization coming imminently. Like I think Clarity, my thesis Clarity fails, this exemption comes immediately after. In my view, there is not a single better asset to be bullish on the tokenization thesis to express that bullishness than Ethereum. What are we missing?

**John Gillen** (3:14)
I think that everybody has gotten a lot of things wrong about a lot of things. So I want to correct a couple of things here. I see this a little bit differently, right? Bitcoin's market cap is, or rather Ethereum's market cap is like over $300 billion now. It's bigger than Coca-Cola, it's bigger than Bank of America, it's bigger than Chevron.
The estimates that I've seen is that there's something like 190 million holders of Ethereum globally. It is a global asset, it is a censorship resistant, open, secure, permissionless asset ecosystem network. And you're right, it does stand to benefit the most from some of the largest momentum, let's say narratives or just like changes that we're seeing to global monetary, financial and economic systems, namely tokenization and agentic finance. I talked about this a lot in this episode, this interview I did with Tom Lee a couple of weeks ago, where I talked about, he talks about Ethereum as the solution to the uncanny valley of wealth. And so what he's talking about is this double narrative that's happening, where Vlad Tenevich has talked about the tokenization super cycle. All assets are migrating on chain, and in addition to that, we're able to tokenize things that previously we didn't have a way to trade in a fungible way in markets and make these assets that can be commoditized and sold. So you're going to be able to swap Twitter clout for a Rembrandt painting and stuff like that, and fractions of these things. So there's a huge amount of things that are unlocked for capital markets by tokenization. This is just the early days of that. Combined with the rise of agentic commerce, and you're going to need some kind of a way through smart contract technology or leveraging the solutions that blockchain technology unlocks and makes possible to maintain human supervision of this new rising economy of trillions of agentic actors trading hundreds of trillions of dollars of value.