David Hoffman, an Ethereum advocate and the co-founder of the media company Bankless, said he sold the remainder of his Ether (ETH) holdings last week because the “ETH is Money” thesis has largely “played out.”
Hoffman said in an X post on Tuesday that “Ethereum got the ETH price it deserves, and I don’t see ETH being rerated as an asset, higher or lower.”
Hoffman said that Ethereum “has done incredibly well, and deserves the market cap that it has,” but the “window of opportunity for ETH to be ‘rerated’ by the market seems to be closing.”
“ETH is, to some degree, money. But not the maximally successful version that we collectively sought out to achieve.”
The “ETH is Money” thesis says the token is a superior store of value compared to fiat money, as it is decentralized and has introduced mechanisms to try to combat inflation, or the amount of new tokens being created.
Many Ether backers bet the token could reach the high five-figures, but ETH reached an all-time high of just below $5,000 in August, about equal to its previous bull market peak during the last cycle. It has since dropped by almost 60% from its all-time peak to trade around $2,000.
ETH prices have been largely range-bound for five years. Source: TradingView
Hoffman, a long-time Ethereum bull who has written extensively on investment cases for Ether, announced selling his entire ETH holdings, the value of which he did not disclose, last Thursday.
He said that Ethereum is a “giver, not a taker,” providing secure blockspace and tokenization at cost while the blockchain’s layer-2 networks capture most of the fees and benefit.
“Ethereum takes no markup for anything it does. This is the nature of open source software, and this is the power of Ethereum. Ethereum supplies its full set of incredibly important values to the world… at cost.”
Hoffman reiterated that he is “massively bullish” on Ethereum, expecting that the network will do “exceptionally well from here on out,” but only a “marginal amount” of that success will be reflected in its token.
Related: Tom Lee predicts supercycle amid Bitmine’s largest Ethereum buy in 2026
Hoffman’s sale saw mixed reactions from ETH backers, with Bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams saying it was the “end of an era.”
Former Ethereum core developer Eric Connor said he didn’t really blame Hoffman because ETH has “grossly underperformed the general crypto market for many years now.”
He attributed the lag mainly to selling pressure from the large number of millionaires created during its explosive early run-up rather than fundamental protocol shortcomings.
“At the end of the day, maximalism to a single coin when it comes to portfolio management is pretty silly,” he said.
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