 My personal prediction is 12,000 to 27,000 per Ethereum within 18 to 30 months. A major Ethereum rally could be around the corner, fueled by predictions that a spot Ethereum ETF would be approved in May this year. Meanwhile, the imminent then-cune upgrade is set to dramatically improve Ethereum's scaling capabilities. What is the potential of Ethereum in this bull market cycle? And what are the challenges that it needs to face in order to win the competition with other Layer 1 blockchains? I address these and more questions in my conversation with Ethereum community member and investor, Ryan Bergmans. Before we dive in, I'm thrilled to announce the upcoming return of Blockshow, the leading event in the crypto and blockchain industry. This time, it's teaming up with Blockdown, a pioneer in the Web3 conference scene. Get ready to join us in Hong Kong for this crypto celebration from May 8 to 9. Don't miss out. Click the link in the description to learn more about these events. And remember, early bird tickets are limited. And now let's get started with the interview. Analysts at the Standard Charter said that there is a high chance an spot Ethereum ETF will be approved by May this year in the US. What do you think about this prediction? What I'm hearing is that with BlackRock pushing for it and there being such similarities in the lead up to the ETF of Bitcoin and Ethereum, it sounds like it will be approved. And I think it will have a massive impact on price. So talking about the price, analysts at the Standard Charter said that Ethereum will likely reach about $4,000 in the run up to the hypothetical approval of a spot Ethereum ETF. What do you think about this assessment? I think it's a positive outlook. I'll say that right now the Ethereum ratio relative to Bitcoin is historically low. One factor is that the crypto cycle is rising. We're entering into a bull market. Next factor, ratio is historically low. That means opportunity for growth if the fundamentals in place, which I argue they are. This crypto cycle over the next, I tend to think of it as being about 18 to 30 months, year and a half to two and a half years. I think it's going to be absolutely spectacular. Essentially the same as last cycle, only much, much bigger. Where do you think are we in the cycle at the moment? I think we're in the second inning, Giovanni. I think that a lot of folks like to think that 2024 is going to be this big blow off top year that the bull, the bull is eminent. I don't think that's the case. I think we're in the warm up here. I think that the real highs are likely to come in 2025 or 26. It's going to take some time. Obviously the US presidential election could have a potentially significant impact on prices. There's a lot of perception that one side is anti-crypto and the other is pro-crypto, which is an unfortunate reality. A lot to see how the election and those perceptions pan out. Overall, I think we're in the early innings of an obvious bull formation. I know that it's difficult to make predictions, but what is the numbers are you looking at in terms of price peak for Ethereum at the top of this cycle? Right. Giovanni, I've looked at my personal prediction for the peak Bitcoin Ether ratio this cycle, as well as some hand wavy math around the fact that following the Ethereum merge to proof of stake, we've eliminated huge amounts of sell pressure into Ether that the mining community was contributing. Ethereum mining was so big that it put a gravity well into the global GPU industry. It was this huge phenomenon. At the top last cycle, not a lot of people know this, but 60% of all proof of work cost was Ethereum. Even though Ethereum had a much smaller market cap than Bitcoin, we were actually contributing about 50% more raw dollars to prove of work sell pressure at those top prices. If you look at the Bitcoin halving and you look at the merge, we should expect aggregate proof of work sell pressure to be over 80% reduced compared to last cycle at the top. This is a bit number, 80%. Last cycle, we were seeing miners dump on average because everything with miners is about averages. They can borrow money, they can delay selling, they have what we call working capital solutions to control when they dump in terms of the timing. So when we talk about miner dumping, we don't literally mean miners have to turn around and sell the day after. We mean that they have a structural circumstance where they eventually have to sell its non-optional. With that in mind, at the top last cycle, it was about a billion dollars a week in proof of work cost. These are big numbers. How many friends and family have to go and put a whole bunch of money into tokens at the top to offset this kind of structural dumping? It's a lot Giovanni. And so I think that Ethereum, this cycle, could see my personal prediction is 12,000 to 27,000 per Ethereum within 18 to 30 months. That's the top top, the tippy top, the pico top. I just want to touch upon something that Vitalik Buterin said not long ago. He published a post where he is saying that he would like Ethereum to go back to the cypherpunk spirit, so the origins of crypto, about decentralization, about peer-to-peer transactions. He noticed that there is a process of over-financialization of these assets. And if we assume that there is this ETF coming up soon, it seems that Ethereum is not going in the direction that Vitalik is advocating for. What are your thoughts on that? You know, to be honest, I think the ETF is small potatoes. The over-financialization that Vitalik cautions us about is not so much related to the ETF as it is related to the pure focus of Ethereum application developers on financial use cases. They're always trying to invent the next best market, the next best synthetic product. And what Vitalik is saying is, guys, we've nailed finance. We're doing it. We're going to keep doing it. We love our finance people. How else can we help the world? What are other ways that Ethereum can have an impact? We're really starting to see that now with things like Farkaster and Decentralized Social. We're going to see, I think, a big rise in payments. Personally, I'm focused on payments now. Payments are not really finance, because payments help at the edges. They tend to help people who need it the most, as opposed to finance being more about richer folks managing their positions. And so I think that Vitalik's call to avoid over-financialization says less about the ETF environment and less about our relationship with TradFi and more about an inward reflection on what kinds of applications we choose to develop during this period of strength for us. I want to touch upon an imminent hard fork that we are going to see in a matter of days or weeks, which is called the Denkun upgrade. So can you tell us, in a few simple words, why this upgrade of Ethereum is so significant? What Denkun adds, the main contribution that everyone is so excited about, is this new type of data storage on the Ethereum L1 called Blobs, like a blob of data. What that does is it's going to expand the data bandwidth of the Ethereum L1 by approximately seven times, seven X. The way that Ethereum has chosen to scale is through a web of chains. So we have these Layer 2 networks. So what is a Layer 2? A Layer 2 is a blockchain that where the security of funds in terms of the theft of funds comes from Ethereum security itself. And so you have all these chains that connect to Ethereum and then through Ethereum, they connect to each other. But in order to achieve this web of chains scaling phenomenon, it has to consume data bandwidth on Ethereum. The problem for L2s is they go to the block space supermarket and they want to get some block space off the shelf and they're so excited. The problem is there's all these corporations at high net worth individuals and protocols in DAOs that are super rich and they come in and they take all the block space off the shelf because they're hungry for block space. And they can afford to spend lots of money on it because they're moving $10,000 a transaction or a lot more. And so the Layer 2s are like, man, this sucks. I want to scale. I want to provide block space for tens of thousands and one day billions of users. But I have to pay all these high fees because I'm competing for block space with all these whales and protocols. Well, that's what the block space changes because the 7x in new data capacity that will launch in March, that 7x is a separate supermarket that you can only use for bulk data purchases. You can't use that data to run a Uniswap transaction on the Ethereum Layer 1 chain. You can't use that data to do a bridging operation or a DAO governance vote or a domain name registration. That data is just bulk snapshot data and it's designed to be ideal for the Layer 2 web of chains use case. What really the outcome of this discussion is is that even though there's only a 7x increase in bandwidth, it should result in about 99% reduced data costs, which is not the only cost for Layer 2s, but it's their primary cost. This fork will result in 99% reduced data costs for Layer 2s because they're no longer competing with all the whales who are trying to buy the block space for Uniswap and all this other stuff. And so in other words, it's a very exciting upgrade that will dramatically scale Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem and set the stage for future scaling. So after the transition to proof of stake, a lot of people are concerned about the over centralization of the ecosystem in the hands of a few powerful staking pools. What would your argument be to address these concerns? Like the thought that Ethereum has been captured and that it's going to be censored and controlled and owned is not true. On the other hand, the Lido liquid staking token does have way too much staking market share. We wish it would reduce by about 1 third from about 30% down to 20%. And so there are some great competitive products coming now that are giving Lido a run for their money. So I think time will tell. But with any luck, we will conquer the Lido market share issue in the years to come. So I think the future of decentralization for Ethereum is bright and we've survived a lot of trials already. So you don't agree with the argument that staking is making even richer as a system? Oh, that's actually a common misconception. You see, the interesting thing about staking is that if you stake $5 of Ethereum through Lido or you stake one Ethereum validator, which today costs, I don't know, about 70,000, or if you stake 100 validators, you actually get the same percentage return as everybody else. And so the rich don't get richer on Ethereum disproportionately. Everybody who stakes gets the same percentage ROI return. And that's actually not true of Bitcoin mining. In Bitcoin mining, the industrialization of mining means that people who have superior access to state-of-the-art hardware and greater economies of scale from larger mining farms to have lower fixed costs and lower cost of hardware from bulk orders, they actually experience higher percentage returns. It's always a pleasure to have you on our show. It was a very cool and interesting conversation. Thanks for having me, I'm Givani. We'll see you next time.