The Executive Chairman of HIBE Blockchain Frank Holmes, CEO and CIO of U.S. Global Investors, has predicted Ethereum ($ETH) will be the next cryptocurrency to explode after arguing it could be seen as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold.
During an interview with Kitco News, Holmes compared demand for BTC and ETH to the demand that is seen for gold and silver on the market. Per his words, when gold “goes to a 50-day moving average, and it goes up 15-20%, silver all of a sudden surges 30%.”
Ethereum, he said, is like silver to BTC’s hold, as when “bitcoin makes the big charge, then all of a sudden Ethereum explodes to the upside.” He also noted that while gold has been used as a safe haven asset, silver has historically had a larger number of use cases than gold.
Similarly, Bitcoin is used as a store of value while Ethereum has more use cases because of the smart contracts on its blockchain. Holmes said:
Ethereum has many more uses than Bitcoin does, the same way silver does…20% of demand for silver is for solar energy. It has a green footprint; viruses can’t live on silver, it has many medical uses. The same thing with Ethereum; it is used for DeFi, for NFTs.
During the interview, Holmes also noted that HIVE Blockchain, the first publicly traded crypto miner listed on the Toronto Venture Exchange, is facing challenges in mining Ethereum because “so many young people have GPU chips for gaming, and they are all mining Ethereum so we get less coins. “
Per his words, machines that used to produce 300 ETH a day when the cryptocurrency was trading at $300 are now producing 80 a day. His biggest concern for the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was that it’s moving to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which could help “shrink the supply outside” but doesn’t “stop the demand and people mining for it.”
Holmes nevertheless also defended Bitcoin’s use as a store of value, saying its greatest asset is “its ability to transfer immediately and cheaply versus traditional transfers of money like Western Union. So, remittance between developed nations and developing nations is a classic reason why Bitcoin is a superior way of moving money.”
Ethereum has been outpacing bitcoin in derivatives open interest. As CryptoGlobe reported, CryptoCompare’s September 2021 Exchange Review showed aggregate open interest in Ethereum-based derivatives products grew 4.7% to $5.8 billion last month, while open interest in bitcoin derivatives fell 3.7% since August to $11.9 billion.
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