The chief investment officer of Bitwise Asset Management, Matt Hougan, says that planned Ethereum (ETH) upgrades will cause the ecosystem to flourish like never before.
In a new interview with Anthony Pompliano, Hougan says that development activity in the Ethereum ecosystem is likely to soar once Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844) is complete since the upgrade aims to drastically lower transaction costs.
“I’m really excited about what’s going on in the Ethereum ecosystem and particularly EIP-4844 and how it will quash costs on layer-2 solutions. I think people don’t understand how important that is. They don’t understand the value of a price that’s effectively zero. If you think about the cost of crypto transactions, it has gone from a few dollars on average with spikes into the hundreds to a handful of 20 cents,10 cents.
It’s going to be sub-penny by the end of this year if Ethereum executes on its roadmap. And the applications that open up at sub-penny that aren’t open at 10 or 20 cents per transaction are really enormous. And I know that sounds very theoretical, but I think it’s a game changer. So I’m really excited about that.”
Hougan also says that the crypto markets have entered a bull market cycle, but investor confidence is only just starting to return to the sector.
“More broadly, I’m just excited to see animal spirits returning to crypto. We are in a bull market. It’s funny, you go out to investors and they still sort of have this bear market mentality. Crypto is the best-performing asset class in the world this year. I think as that seeps in we’re going to see some of those animal spirits return to this space. So Ethereum and the roadmap there, the broader bull market in crypto and how that will change, I think this will be a very exciting year. But I think the next three years are going to be phenomenal in crypto.”
Ethereum is trading for $1,863 at time of writing, up 3.5% in the past 24 hours.