The Institutional Case for Ethereum AND Solana

**Nick Roberts-Huntley** (0:00)
I think we can comfortably see ETH approach new all-time highs within the next couple of years. I think that Solana has the capacity to go through the roof if it gets the right density of transaction volume and the right institutional partners.

**John Gilland** (0:14)
Institutions have never been more bullish on crypto, but price and sentiment haven't been this bad since FTX. What are the institutions building? Why is it so bullish? And what do investors need to know to make it through this bear market? Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that when Sailor starts crashing out during interviews, we might finally be near the bottom. I'm your host, John Gilland, and today we are joined by Nick Roberts-Huntley. Nick is the founder and CEO of Blueprint Finance, a DeFi infrastructure company behind protocols like Concrete on Ethereum and Glow on Solana.
Dr. Nick is going to share a ton of institutional alpha with us today. So if that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe. Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. Before we jump in, if you want to see exactly what our analysts here at Milk Road are buying, selling, and researching in real time, Milk Road PRO is 33% off this week only. Check out the link in the show notes to come join our community. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitget Stocks 2 with real liquidity, real dividends, and Securitize, the regulated rails for tokenization. And without further ado, welcome back to The Milk Road Show. Nick, how are you, sir?

**Nick Roberts-Huntley** (1:16)
Well thank you. How are you?

**John Gilland** (1:18)
I'm doing really well. Nick, I think it's really interesting. Your business, you're building on both Solana and Ethereum. So I thought a good place to start this conversation would be a discussion of Solana and Ethereum.
What's your current outlook on ETH and Sol here? What is the state of the crypto market for these crypto majors that are facing some headwinds, but still have some legs? Like, what's your outlook on ETH and Sol here?

**Nick Roberts-Huntley** (1:41)
Yeah, I mean, I think as far as Ethereum and Solana are considered, you've got two foundations, which are kind of like a tale of two cities, where Ethereum has largely been a very technical, almost academically driven and kind of build best in class products, which have a huge amount of the core blockchain principles in situ, and hope that people will build great businesses on top of that kind of rail and infrastructure that they provide in a very kind of tier 1A network. The other side, you have Solana, who I think are probably as a foundation and from a leadership perspective, I think probably the strongest business operators as far as a network is considered. And so I think we've had a tale of Solana understanding how to run a fantastic network as a business, where the technology works. And it has, as such, caught the momentum of different phases in the crypto cycle, like meme coins when they were so prolific on Solana. And Ethereum, which has captured a lot of the traditional, almost kind of dogmatic belief in blockchain, in crypto as a financial system or as an application, as a layer for applications to be built upon in businesses. I think that's not going to change anytime soon. I know there's a lot of chatter about change at the Ethereum Foundation coming up.
I'm still bullish both of them. I think when you look at the absolute value of those networks, there's still a huge amount of room to grow. If we believe in digital assets and blockchain over the next decade, which I think probably given my current job and title, I'm fairly long horizon on, and I assume you are too.

**John Gilland** (3:11)
Yeah, I think that's a helpful perspective. And we're still early days in this industry. The industry is going to grow, the pie to fight over the market share, the addressable market is going to grow.
And different blockchain ecosystems can thrive in those environments. Do you think that there is room for both of these organizations and these ecosystems to succeed and thrive long term? And do you think they're going to get more and more siloed into these different niches that they've established over time? Or do you think that's going to evolve too?

**Nick Roberts-Huntley** (3:39)
I think we're yet to see what widespread adoption and success looks like as far as networks are concerned. The question that I could posit back is like, well, should Microsoft and Oracle exist at the same time? Should HP and Dell exist at the same time?