When you sit down for a job interview, you might be asked a couple of standard questions.

“What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” “Why do you want to work here?” And of course, the ultimate cliché: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Now, you might want to say “Living in the woods, covered in antlers and body paint.” Or something like, “I’ll have your job, then I’ll be the one asking the questions.” But you’ll probably hit them with a vanilla response about career ambitions and a middle-management salary.

So we asked Ethereum where it wanted to be in five years, and the answer was “Bigger than Bitcoin.”

At first, we thought Ethereum had gone off its meds. Then, we started reading. A response that initially came off as unhinged might be… more than possible.

Is there a near future where Ethereum is as big — or even bigger — than Bitcoin?

Espresso Shots

☕️ Raising the Crypto Market Cap by $1 Trillion

If the Bitcoin Spot ETFs are approved within the year, it could raise the crypto market cap by almost $1 trillion, reads a new report from the data analytics firm, CryptoQuant.

The report states that there is a growing probability for favorable verdicts for the wave of Bitcoin Spot ETF applications, based on Grayscale’s recent legal victory.

If the applications are approved by the March 2024 final deadline, CryptoQuant predicts that $150 billion will flow into the Bitcoin market and crypto’s overall market cap will increase by about $900 billion.

Honestly, the last time I heard numbers that high, my older brother was promising me I could punch him “infinity” times if I didn’t tell Mom he knocked my front teeth out.

☕️ Accounting Professor Takes the Witness Stand in SBF Case

Peter Easton, an accounting professor at the University of Notre Dame, took to the stand on Wednesday morning to lend his expertise to the ongoing Sam Bankman-Fried trial.

Easton was hired by the DOJ to use his skills to trace billions of dollars in funds from Alameda and FTX.

Not only is Easton a gifted accountant, but his background in academia made him the perfect federal witness to walk the jury through some of the more complicated, financial aspects of the trial.

Easton reportedly created his own chart to demonstrate to the jury the growing disparity between FTX’s user deposits and the firm’s actual balances.

Bear in mind that Professor Peter Easton has no relation to Professor Clint Easton, a professor emeritus of guns and cowboys at Tough Guy University.

☕️ Nelly Hacked for Crypto Scam

Cornell Iral Haynes Jr., a rapper more famously known as “Nelly,” had his X account hacked and used for a crypto phishing scam.

Nelly’s account, which has since been taken down, was briefly renamed “@NellioETH” as the hacker presented themselves as both the rapper, Nelly, and a security expert for Scam Sniffer, a very real web-based security firm.

The imposter would DM users links containing an Etherscan link to their own wallets, again, pretending to be some strange combination of rapper and security expert.

If X users clicked on the link, their wallet would be promptly drained. We currently don’t have numbers on how many users were affected by the scam, but Nelly is taking a break from X.

Even more twisted, the phishing site welcomed victims with Nelly’s own lyrics. “It’s getting hot in here, so give me your crypto. I am, getting so hot, take all my digital aaaassets.”

Polled Brew

Spilling the Beans

Ethereum Could Rise 500% in Next 5 Years 📈 👀

If Bitcoin is crypto’s protagonist, Ethereum is its plucky sidekick.

The Robin to Bitcoin’s Batman. Or the Chewbacca to crypto’s Han Solo. Chewbacca is, if you think about it, really a sidekick to a sidekick, which technically makes him a tertiary protagonist.

Anyway.

Maybe it’s time for Ethereum to stop playing second fiddle to Ethereum and start playing… first fiddle.

During our long, Bitcoin ETF purgatory, there have been countless optimistic discussions that the approval of these applications could be the catalyst that sends Bitcoin on a bull run back to the $60,000 price points of yesteryear, and beyond.

But we’ve become so wrapped up in Bitcoin, that we’ve forgotten to hope for Ethereum.

What if there was a future where Ethereum could surge in price, not just beating Bitcoin, but racing past it?

This isn’t just some theoretical. Serious analysts have taken the time to consider Ethereum’s future and the outlook is pretty rosy.

According to the research team at Standard Chartered, the British multinational banking corporation, Ethereum may be poised to increase as much as 500% by 2026.

And that’s just part of the long-term “structural valuation” from Standard Chartered which predicts Ethereum will be somewhere from $26,000 to $35,000 by the year 2040.

Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s Head of FX Research (West) and Digital Assets Research explained to Reuters the reasoning behind Standard Chartered’s valuation.

"That valuation assumes future use cases and revenue streams that may not have emerged yet, although the real-world use cases of gaming and tokenisation should support their development," said Kendrick in the report.

In short, nobody can really predict the future, or the new industries and events that will shape the crypto market. But there is one thing that Ethereum has more than Bitcoin or any other crypto and that’s utility. Utility. Utility.

Bitcoin rose to prominence because it was the first crypto.

But Bitcoin, despite its transactional use cases and blockchain compatibility, is ultimately just a store of value. And it only recently became NFT-friendly.

Ethereum, on the other hand, takes the blockchain and runs with it. Entire smart contracts and networks can be built on Ethereum, and we’re still discovering new possibilities.

Yes, we’re all for HODL-ing Bitcoin and we’re not telling you to abandon your BTC dreams.

But as new uses for Ethereum are discovered practically every day, it’s only a matter of time before there’s a tremendous, perfect click.

It could be AI, the Metaverse, or a tech that hasn’t even been invented yet, that catapults Ethereum to the top of its class.

But even today, Ethereum’s going strong. Yes, way down since its pre-crypto winter peak of $4,689, but Ethereum has clawed back 30% in 2023.

And yeah, we’ve been talking about Bitcoin Billionaires for some time, but in the coming years those big dogs may have to move over for Ethereum Millionaires or even, yes, Ethereum Billionaires.

Though, without the alliteration, Ethereum Billionaires doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? Maybe Ethereum Eagles? Ethereum Envoys? Ethillionaires?

We’ll get on that. But it’s okay, according to Standard Chartered, we still have a few years to think of something clever.

Crypto 101

Etherscan: This is the leading block explorer for the Ethereum blockchain.

A block explorer is simply a search engine that allows users to look up and validate any transaction on the Ethereum blockchain.

You can also, as the Nelly hacker did, look up individual wallets.

The Last Sip

The Last Sip: Though many people know that Professor Clint Easton holds master's degrees in both guns and cowboys, not many people know that during undergrad he minored in “making your mouth into a really small little line.”

Stay Caffeinated,

Coffee & Crypto Team

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