What is Ethereum worth?

Ethereum is the world’s second most valuable cryptocurrency:

Bitcoin is hard to price because it’s not obvious what it should be used for. Bitcoin is called a store of value, but its value fluctuates wildly. It’s a method of online payment, but there are lots of ways to pay online, both with and without crypto. For the most part, it’s a speculative asset which derives its value from scarcity: there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins. Over time, fewer and fewer Bitcoins are mined, so it becomes harder for new entrants to buy into the market. In theory, it should just keep getting more expensive every 4 years, as the mining rate changes. In reality, you’d expect the price to level off rather than become more valuable than anything else in the world.

Ethereum is different, in that it offers a function. It can be used to build smart contract systems, and its owners derive some value from those contracts being executed.

If more people start using those smart contracts, then the value of ETH would go up, proportionately.

How high could it go?

Vaneck offers a bull case, where ETH is worth $154,000 in 5 years, a base case where it’s…