Topic: VanEck thinks Ether ETF would be even bigger than Bitcoin ETF - page 2. (Read 263 times)

https://coinpedia.org/crypto-live-news/vaneck-predicts-ether-etfs-may-surpass-bitcoin-etfs-in-popularity/


VanEck, one of the Bitcoin ETF proviers, thinks Ether ETFs will make more sense to investors and be even more popular than Bitcoin ETFs.

What do you think?



Personally I can see that rationale simply from the fact that Ether has a payout from staking. So assuming the ETFs would stake the Ethereum and offer a perhaps quarterly payout, that would definitely help its popularity. Bitcoin's popularity of course it based on it becoming a global currency in the future and the world's alternative to fiat currencies. Makes more sense to actually own bitcoin itself, but for money stuck in TradFi circles BTC ETFs make for fantastic investments.

But Ether has much less of a visible use case than Bitcoin. Ethereum is the place where lots of fad crypto apps and random tokens and useless NFT pictures go. Even though the whole point of it being a smart contract platform is to use Ether MORE often than people use something that is simply a currency like Bitcoin, the fact that there isn't much reason to use anything built on Ethereum in the first place kinda makes it make more sense to hold Ether through an ETF simply to get the payout from staking. Of course that only works as long as people keep attempting to build stuff on Ethereum and the hype market for that continues. But if Ether ETFs get approved (which I think is realistically probably a few years away) TradFi getting access to a "bitcoin-like" thing that pays out ~3% annually income could actually be the most viable use case of Ethereum, far beyond any actual crypto-specific / smart contract use cases of Ethereum.

If there are enough people in TradFi who think Ethereum is close enough to Bitcoin that they should own it too, plus it comes with a payout like the dividends they are used to, that alone could keep Ethereum relevant even if the ETH ecosystem never really goes anywhere and just keeps being for fad-ish crypto experiments that pump and dump during Bitcoin-driven bull runs.

Anyway, interesting to think about. I personally own ETH at this point purely to make income from staking. I will just hold my ETH forever and use for passive income, never having to sell the capital base and pay taxes on that base. And that would be the use case of ETH ETFs, and may end up being the primary ETH use case in general. The question is, I suppose, is that enough, or are major applications gonna at some point have to be made on Ethereum for it to remain relevant and keep the price moving close to Bitcoin's trajectory.

So is making ~3% payout on a much less certain and more risky Ethereum enough to make it as big a hit or even a bigger hit with TradFi investors than Bitcoin is?