Where is ETH in the cycle? | Michael Nadeau

**Ryan** (0:03)
Bankless Nation, today, we're gonna check in on Ether, the asset. Where is ETH in the cycle? My favorite cycle investor, Michael Nadeau from The DeFi Report is on the podcast today. We do these episodes on the Bankless Feed every month. And this one, I asked Mike to prepare a little information for the ETH holders among us. Mike and I have talked a lot about fair market value metrics for Bitcoin, the weekly moving averages and VRV, all of the metrics. We've looked at many charts about Bitcoin. But ETH has its own cycle that is related to the broader crypto cycle, yet also independent of Bitcoin. So what do Mike's numbers say about ETH price in the months to come? I want to know if he thinks it's bottomed. If not, when is it going to bottom? ETH is one of three assets that Mike has held from the last cycle. So I know he owns some. Is he planning to buy more? If so, when? Now, I should qualify, unlike many guests on Bankless, Mike is not an ETH permable. He is bullish ETH, has been bullish ETH various times, but he's looking at this from a fairly neutral perspective. That is, what do the on-chain fundamentals actually say for this asset? Mike, it's great to have you. I know Bitcoin is your favorite asset. Historically, ETH has been a second, maybe not a close second, but definitely a second. Is ETH still your second favorite asset in crypto or does this cycle, does it have to prove itself once again in this cycle?

**Michael Nadeau** (1:37)
Hey, Ryan. Yeah, great to be here. And that's a great question, I think, to lead in here.
I would say that the way I think of this is I think of Bitcoin as sort of a thing that we want to anchor our portfolio in. We've had periods where we were more bullish on ETH, less bullish on ETH. We still own some ETH currently in our portfolio. And one of the things that I like about the cyclicality of the crypto markets, and just kind of like the sort of four-year nature of these markets, is that we get a chance to kind of like underwrite our thesis for Bitcoin, for ETH, for other assets that we may want to invest in. And so I think this episode today is kind of an opportunity to kind of go back and sort of analyze like just high level, like what has happened with ETH over these last few years? You know, where are we going? And kind of get into some of the kind of like, where are we at in the cycle? Are we bottoming right now? So yeah, excited to get into it. But I would say ETH, to answer the question, ETH has to prove itself to me. And like we can kind of get into what I'm looking for in this episode.

**Ryan** (2:40)
All right. So ETH has an opportunity to prove itself to Mike this cycle in order for him to re-underwrite whether it should be included in the DeFi Report portfolio. Before we get into this episode, I want to thank our friends and sponsors over at Galaxy. This one is for the institutional capital listening, whether you are looking at the future of finance or the backbone of the next industrial revolution that of course is AI. Galaxy is the name you need to know. They're a global leader, not just in crypto and digital assets, but also AI data infrastructure. You know the ticker. They are GLXY. They have a bunch of crypto offerings, including next generation institutional training, Custine Tokenization, and also their Helios site. This is an AI data center with 1.6 gigawatts of power. So go check them out. If you want to see how Galaxy helps institutions in crypto and AI, invest, build and transform, go check them out. There's a link in the show notes. All right, Mike, as we enter this episode, ETH price is just hovering above 2K. So it's hanging in there in this bear market. I actually want to go back and talk about the history of ETH across the three cycles that it's been around. So it hasn't been around as long as Bitcoin, but it's been around for a while. We've got 10 years or so clocking in. So there's been three cycles that ETH has boomed and then busted so far. The first was 2017 And the bottom of that cycle sometime in late 2016, ETH was $8. So just imagine that, not 2K, but $8. In 2017 at the peak, this lasted into January 2018, ETH went from $8 to $1,400.
So this was incredible growth. This was 175X in the first cycle. So remember that, cycle one, 175X from trough to peak. Cycle two, this was 2021 We saw a 61X gain. So that's 6,000%. The trough there, we hit this in December 2018, $80. By November 2021, that turned out to be the top, we were at 4,878. So 61X in cycle two. 175X cycle one, 61X cycle two. Let's talk about the most recent cycle that ended in 2025 So there, we troughed down to in June 2022, $881.