Strike CEO Jack Mallers says that’s “ridiculous.” Ethereum may be “the new Apple,” but Bitcoin’s goal is to disrupt money, a market between $400-500T.
Last week, Ethereum cofounder and ConsenSys CEO Joseph Lubin took to Twitter to comment on an interview with Tom Lee, whose company BitMine (the MicroStrategy of Ethereum) is now the largest holder of ETH, with 1.86 million coins.
Lubin predicted that the ETH price would likely “100x from here,” and that Ethereum flipping Bitcoin would be a reality not far down the line.
He also doubled down on his bullish stance, saying, “The real problem is that it is not possible to be bullish enough.” Lubin isn’t alone in his optimism.
Ethereum has had a monster 2025 so far: institutional interest is booming, and people are excited about ETFs, staking yields, ETH treasury companies, and the unstoppable march of DeFi.
But let’s zoom out. Lubin’s argument is that all the developers, protocols, startups, and unicorns built on Ethereum will fuel a tidal wave of adoption, and that network effects alone can launch ETH past BTC.
Of course, Lubin has every right to his enthusiasm; he’s fighting for the relevance of his protocol after all.
But calling for a world where the money of the internet is replaced by a technology protocol misses a few glaring truths.
And you can almost hear the giggles from Bitcoin diehards at this point. Ethereum flipping Bitcoin? Not on any BTC maxi’s watch.
Jack Mallers, CEO of Strike and one of Bitcoin’s most outspoken defenders, added his thoughts on Ethereum flipping Bitcoin in a widely circulated video.
Mallers doesn’t hold back. “Let’s be real,” he says, the notion is absolutely “ridiculous.” Mallers begins by dissecting the size of the problem Bitcoin is solving.
He points out that Bitcoin’s goal is to disrupt money, a market sized between $400 and $500 trillion that represents the total value mined, saved, and exchanged by humankind.
“That’s what Bitcoin’s going after,” he explains in plain speak. Ethereum, on the other hand, isn’t positioning itself as money.
Instead, it’s designed to be a global supercomputer, a stablecoin power-upper, and a platform for smart contracts and NFTs.
Even if Ethereum were to become “the new Apple,” Mallers states, one of the most valuable technology companies in history, it could be as large as Bitcoin is today, roughly three trillion dollars.
But that’s still a far cry from the value that money represents in the global financial system. He remarked,
“So you’re saying Ethereum, the world’s computer, is gonna be bigger than the equities market? What are you, smoking crack? Are you crazy? It’s just stupid.”
Throughout the video, Mallers stresses the fundamental difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum and says that you simply can’t compare the two:
“There’s money and then there are companies. Two entirely different things.”
Ethereum? Sure, there’s massive upside potential if the tech truly changes the world. But its value proposition is tied to the success of the applications built atop it.
Ethereum’s supply isn’t capped. Unlike Bitcoin, which has a fixed upper limit of 21 million coins, Ethereum does not have a maximum supply.
Leadership changes and roadmap pivots happen, just like any major tech firm. It’s a playground for rapid innovation (and also, inevitably, rapid obsolescence for some of its features).
Ask any Wall Street vet what they’d rather bet their retirement on: A new OS for app developers, or a monetary protocol with 15 years of unbroken uptime, a predictable issuance schedule, and the trust of hundreds of millions worldwide?
Ethereum flipping Bitcoin would be like Apple flipping the US dollar. Or as Mallers said at BTC Prague last year, “There is no second best.”
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