Wartime Ethereum: The Case For ETH Going Much Higher

Summary

• Gillen’s core call is directional, not a price target: he reports Jeff Kendrick’s view that ETH reaches $40,000 by 2030, but says he is not hung up on predictions. His own expectation is that ETH resolves “somewhere above $5,000” in the relatively near term; he adds, “This is not financial advice… I don’t know whether that’s going to happen.” The thesis stays live because stablecoins, RWA tokenization, and the agentic economy are all “just beginning to take off”; if Ethereum had already lost that market share, “I would have a different view of this.”
• His rebuttal to David Hoffman’s ETH sale is the episode’s intellectual spine: “All of finance is downstream of faith. The whole system is based on faith. And Ethereum’s chief product is faith” — not trust-me-bro faith, but truth. The addressable market he attaches to that: ~$700 trillion of assets, with FX swaps alone doing $5–9 trillion of daily volume, all seeking a credibly neutral settlement layer — and ex-Bitcoin, ~80% of crypto capital already sits in the Ethereum ecosystem.
• From his BlackRock vantage, “Wall Street absolutely gets it” — the fight is banks defending custody, not institutions doubting the tech. Asset managers as fiduciaries will use the best rails; banks like BNY Mellon with “over $50 trillion of assets under custody” are building their own consortiums instead, because “if you have $50 trillion under custody, you can fight it pretty hard in a lot of very creative ways.” Still: “the genie is not going back in the bottle.”
• He flags “the largest institutional bull run in the history of digital assets at the same time that retail investors are checking out” — a bullish divergence but also a “troubling and worrisome gulf.” His worry is retail missing “the ground floor of the next century of finance” while speculative capital rotates through the “hot ball of money”; his posture is to endure 50% drawdowns with equanimity, while staying patient because “the money is made in the waiting.”
• He has soured on the Clarity Act: it has been “gerrymandered” into “more of a bill to protect the banks than to help the digital asset space,” and a hostile future administration could turn it into “a quagmire, a Trojan horse.” He’s “not optimistic that this comes through anymore”; DeFi Dad notes Polymarket odds of 2026 passage have fallen to 43% from 75–80%.
• The EF downsizing plus ETH Labs is, in his telling, “one of the most bullish moments we’ve seen in Ethereum’s recent history.” Gillen estimates BitMine and SharpLink together have roughly 7% of ETH supply and generate $400–500M a year in staking rewards; he describes their move as beginning to use some of that capital for ecosystem growth — potentially providing “a strategy not just for the success of Ethereum the network but for the success of the asset.”
• The export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5 are framed as AI’s Russia-SWIFT moment: once a government demonstrates willingness, not just capacity, to restrict or take away a technology, everyone starts pricing the need for a censorship-resistant alternative. With open-source models lagging frontier models by ~6 months and Aschenbrenner arguing AGI could be nationalized, Ethereum is “top of the pile” for decentralized builders and users seeking a “trustless state” and a long-term call option.

Deep dive

1. The headline call: directionally “much higher,” with a $5,000 marker he half-regrets

• Gillen reports Jeff Kendrick’s view that Ethereum reaches “$40,000 by 2030,” but says he is “not really hung up on a price prediction.” His own expectation, “based on the history, based on the chart, and based on what I’m seeing happen in the markets,” is that ETH resolves “somewhere above $5,000” in the relatively near term. He later admits, “I probably shouldn’t have used a specific price target.”
• He explicitly says this is not financial advice and that he does not know whether it will happen. The condition that keeps the thesis on: if he agreed with David Hoffman that it had already played out — tokenization, the agentic economy, and stablecoin adoption were complete, with Ethereum’s share lost to competitors — he’d change his view. But all three are “just beginning to take off,” so “directionally higher is good enough for me right now, and much higher is also how I feel.”

2. The messenger: six years on BlackRock’s Aladdin, now Milk Road and True Capital

• Gillen spent six years at BlackRock on the Aladdin platform in client services and relationship management, working with the digital-asset strategy team on projects including the Coinbase–Aladdin integration. During that period, he also wrote scripts for Discover Crypto, one of the largest digital-asset YouTube channels. He left in February 2025, consults on tokenomics and white papers, advises family offices and VC firms, runs the True Capital fund, and hosts Milk Road content. Milk Road has also launched Milk Road AI; Gillen hosts Milk Road Macro, which is being folded into Milk Road Crypto and Milk Road AI.
• Why he’s a decade deep in digital assets: they are “protocol-level defenses of individual rights, of sovereignty, capital, information.” His history-of-governance sweep runs from the Magna Carta through the perennial tension between centralized authority and individual liberty, now being tested “at an accelerating, more rapid, and higher-stakes rate.”

3. Why ETH: credible neutrality is what Wall Street calls counterparty-risk minimization

• The market-share fact doing the work: outside Bitcoin, “something like 80% of the capital is in the Ethereum ecosystem in some form or another.” What crypto natives call decentralization or credible neutrality, TradFi calls counterparty-risk minimization — a point he references from Avichal Garg on the Empire podcast — and Ethereum’s CROPS bundle (censorship-resistant, open, permissionless, private, secure, scalable) is “very difficult to counterfeit or to reproduce.”
• The disqualifier for alternatives: “if your whole ecosystem only has a billion or two billion dollars of liquidity, then you’re not going to be ready for prime time in terms of institutional adoption.”
• His sharpest contrast: Sui has “one of the best teams in all of digital assets,” yet “just a few months ago their blockchain paused four times — that’s not something you’ve ever seen on Ethereum,” against ten years of uptime and network upgrades without failures, interruptions, or shutdowns.

4. “Wartime Ethereum” is a call to lean in — and the “can’t be evil” distinction

• His own admission of why the title works: “Wartime Ethereum, as I said in my essay, just sounds cool — it’s the kind of energy we need right now.” It’s a call for engagement against burnout, rage-quitting, and capitulation: “it’s not okay to just get bored and quit or take your marbles and go home because you’re frustrated for this week or this month or this bear market.”
• The alignment dynamic he wants preserved: the Ethereum Foundation owns roughly 0.16% of ETH supply while Vitalik has 90% of his personal wealth in ETH — “total personal commitment but also total commitment to decentralization, and not even an opportunity for compromising that.”
• The line that triggers DeFi Dad’s rant: “It’s not ‘don’t be evil’ like Google used to say — it can’t be evil… In all these legacy systems we have systems of trust. In Ethereum, we have a system of truth.”
• DeFi Dad then brings up Eric Schmidt being booed while telling students they would be working for AI anyway, Google’s drift from “don’t be evil” into the military-industrial complex, and the Moloch frame: “you can make a thousand decisions based on incentives and wake up one day and you don’t even know where you are.” He says Ethereum has resisted Moloch “at literally every instance.”

5. The Hoffman rebuttal: faith is not philosophy, it’s the balance sheet

• Hoffman’s position as Gillen relays it: the network is good, but ETH “sort of got the price it deserves” and will not be repriced — so he sold. Gillen’s counter is categorical: “All of finance is downstream of faith… and Ethereum’s chief product is faith. But not just faith in ’trust me, bro,’ but truth.” If Ethereum offers the strongest trust solution, it attracts pristine capital, which attracts agentic activity, which drives the burn — “that’s just the definition of a functioning economy and the monetary asset of that economy.”
• The scale he attaches: “an addressable market of 700 or so trillion dollars of assets,” with FX swaps alone at “$5 to $9 trillion” of volume every day. He also says, in his telling, that fiat comes from the word faith.
• His grounding example: a potato farmer signs a forward contract on next year’s crop, and only then can finance planting. “That’s all downstream of faith in that contract. These are why these things matter. It’s not an abstract thing. It’s extremely concrete.”

6. Wall Street “absolutely gets it” — the resistance is a custody business model

• After attending a BlackRock alumni event at Hudson Yards with Joe Shalom of SharpLink, Gillen’s read is that this is an easy sell because blockchain infrastructure is “an order-of-magnitude, or at least a stepwise, improvement” and “completely dominates in every way the solutions that they’re using today.” The incumbent stack is “a complex Rube Goldberg machine of nine different systems… 30 days to actually settle,” and “a lot of private credit is just being done off of people’s Excel sheets that they’re just emailing back and forth.”
• The fault line he draws: asset managers are contractually fiduciaries and will use whatever the best protocol is; banks’ business “largely depends on the custody of assets” — BNY Mellon has “over $50 trillion of assets under custody” — so they build their own consortiums and rails to keep capital “effectively in their coffers and rent it back to their users.”
• Pace check: the SEC chairman “says he wants to tokenize everything in two years,” and Wall Street is hiring and reallocating at what, by Wall Street standards, is breakneck speed, even if it feels glacial to crypto natives. “The genie is not going back in the bottle.”
• DeFi Dad corroborates from prior episodes: Robert Leshner described financial systems still running on COBOL built in the 1950s, while Chainlink’s Johann Eid argued that institutions move very slowly and “then once they get it, it happens all at once.”

7. The bullish divergence — and why the money is made in the waiting

• The observation Gillen keeps underlining at Milk Road: “we are seeing the largest institutional bull run in the history of digital assets at the same time that retail investors are checking out and tuning out and their sentiment is abysmal. That is a big bullish divergence, but it is also a troubling and worrisome gulf.” His fear is retail missing “the ground floor of the next century of finance.”
• On timelines he’s honest: “this doesn’t happen in one cycle or two… anytime you guess, you’re going to be a little bit wrong.” His analogy is email, which existed for decades before people understood what it was. Meanwhile the “hot ball of money” rotates through CryptoKitties, ICOs, Solana’s Pump.fun, gold and silver, semiconductors, and SpaceX, leaving fundamentally strong assets unloved, ETH included.
• He cites an unnamed investor’s idea that “the money is made in the waiting,” and Charlie Munger on enduring a 50% portfolio drawdown with equanimity. ETH is “the best risk/reward on the market for the next 5 to 10 years.” He says the thesis would look different if the $700 trillion tokenized onto Sui, Cardano, Solana, or another competitor: “it’s still too soon to call this, and Ethereum is still the front-runner… while the race is still being run.”

8. Clarity Act: from market-structure bill to “Trojan horse”

• His change of mind is the story here: the bill has been “gerrymandered, frankly,” drifting from developer protection into “more of a bill to protect the banks than to help the digital asset space.” The danger is that a future hostile administration could use vague language to “bog down all of the digital asset space in bureaucratic legal paperwork… it can be a quagmire, a Trojan horse.” Bottom line: “I’m not optimistic that this comes through anymore.”
• The live obstacles he lists: four law-enforcement organizations sent a letter to White House executive director on digital assets Patrick Witt and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, amid concerns reported by Eleanor Terrett; “Jamie Dimon keeps moving the goalposts… using ad hominem attacks against Brian Armstrong.” The effort to pass it through the House and Senate in July and sign it in August keeps slipping; otherwise, he says, the next chance could be 2027, 2028, or 2030. DeFi Dad checks Polymarket live: 43% odds of 2026 passage, down from 75–80%.
• What comes after any clarity: a “then they fight you stage that looks different” — Meta entering prediction markets and big tech, banks, and exchanges potentially launching wallets, stablecoins, and competing products — “a huge knife fight for market share.” Gillen expects competition to benefit users overall, though he remains concerned about who the rules give an advantage to.

9. EF downsizing + ETH Labs: “one of the most bullish moments in Ethereum’s recent history”

• His reframe of the “exodus” narrative: what critics described as a talent flight and funding crisis “is really just the Ethereum ecosystem reshaping itself.” The EF’s mandate is “subtraction” — “Vitalik does not want to be the emperor of Ethereum” — and he gives Hoffman credit: “David caught a lot of flak for what he did, but what he did brought a lot of attention to an acute need.”
• His governance detour: Madison’s “if men were angels, we would not need government,” Plato’s Republic and Socrates’ criticism of democracy as tyranny, and the ecosystem itself as a form of governance “where everybody has as much agency as anyone else to co-create.”
• DeFi Dad introduces ETH Labs by saying he believes it is backed by BitMine and SharpLink and thinks Konstantin Lomashuk is involved. Gillen identifies BitMine and SharpLink as two leaders and estimates that together they have “around 7%” of Ethereum’s total supply and generate “somewhere around $400 million to $500 million a year” in staking rewards. He describes their move as beginning to use some of that capital for ecosystem growth. With Haseeb of Dragonfly Capital participating, Gillen says it seems there may finally be a strategy not just for Ethereum the network but for Ethereum the asset. “I don’t think there’s any way you could look at this where it comes out as a net negative.”

10. The Fable 5 export ban is AI’s Russia-SWIFT moment

• His governing analogy: when Russia invaded Ukraine, the US kicked it off SWIFT and froze assets — demonstrating “not only a capacity to use it, but a willingness.” He says this was followed by BRICS moving toward mBridge, broader movement away from dollar-denominated assets toward gold, and a major gold bull run, while cautioning that some of the shift has been overplayed and the dollar remains dominant.
• He applies the same logic to the export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5: if the government can take a model away “with a decree, that’s not really a secure business model.” Aschenbrenner’s 165-page Situational Awareness argues that frontier AGI could ultimately be nationalized for national-security reasons; Gillen says open-source models lag frontier models by “somewhere around a six-month window.” The discussion’s alleged NSA breach is explicitly caveated: “the NSA hasn’t admitted to anything.”
• His aside is that DeFi hacks are visible because they are public, while other AI-enabled attacks may be covered up. Once corporations and nation-states realize they need an exit, “Ethereum is top of the pile” — a credible alternative and “trustless state” for decentralized AI, technology, or finance. He connects this to Eric Voorhees’ use of Ethereum for Venice and Sergey Nazarov’s “systems of trust to systems of truth” framing, arguing that ETH Labs must evangelize this value rather than assume “if we build it, they will come.”

11. Valuing ETH: triple-point asset, not an L1 fee multiple

• He leans on Hoffman’s “Ethereum Is a Triple-Point Asset” framing: ETH is consumable because it is burned to transact, a store of value because it is the monetary asset of the economy, and a capital asset because it supports productive DeFi activity. All three drive value together, with the caveat that recent scalability upgrades “put a little bit of slack in the rope on Ethereum’s burn mechanism.”
• His answer to the bear-case valuation: “if you value ETH just on its layer 1 transaction fees, it should be worth $30 or something, right? But Bitcoin is not valued that way.” Bitcoin is primarily a store of value, whereas Ethereum has additional value drivers.
• The demand kicker: the agentic economy brings “a trillion-plus new economic participants who never sleep, never eat, and are only here to make money as efficiently as they can,” leveraging EVM tools — a “virtuous cycle that feeds back on itself.”
• DeFi Dad’s close ties the thesis to current stablecoin demand: he cites roughly $160 billion in stablecoins as of recording and separately says, with uncertainty, that there are around $30 billion of stablecoins across all chains; the transcript does not reconcile those two figures. He places stablecoins under the RWA/tokenization umbrella and credits Larry Fink with bringing tokenization mainstream after once dismissing the space as a tinkering experiment. “If you can understand why demand will continue to increase, you can wrap your head around why ETH has much higher to go.”