Over the past few years, watching Ethereum’s growth path has been truly fascinating. It marks its 10th anniversary this year, and hearing that over the past decade its market capitalization has grown by 3,600 times really makes you realize the scale is completely different.

In fact, while NVIDIA has grown 150 times and Bitcoin has grown 300 times, Ethereum has grown 3,600 times. In just 10 years, it has become one of the world’s top 30 assets by market capitalization. Its current circulating market cap is around 280B, but I think this might really be just the starting line.

Even though the annual transaction volume of stablecoins alone exceeds $20 trillion, more than 70% of that occurs on Ethereum. Decentralized exchanges, staking, lending, derivatives, NFTs… The Ethereum mainnet itself has never experienced outages or crashes in the past 10 years. That says a lot about how strong it is from a security standpoint.

When thinking about Ethereum’s possibilities 10 years from now, I genuinely believe there is still 100x room for growth. The reason is simple: even if TVL increased by 100 times, it would still be less than 2% of the world’s financial assets. Even if the user base grew by 100 times, it would be around 1 billion people. Visa and MasterCard have already issued more than 3 billion cards, so that comparison doesn’t even come close.

What’s interesting is that the stablecoin growth pattern could spread directly to other financial products. The stablecoin market, which was $1 million in 2016, reached $1 billion in 2018 and $100 billion in 2021. That is a 1,000x increase in 2 years and a 100x increase in 4 years. I can’t help but think that tokenization of U.S. Treasuries and U.S. stocks could grow at the same pace.

Considering the scenario for Ethereum 10 years from now, I think it won’t just be an “alternative” to the global financial system—it will become something that redefines finance itself. It’s similar to the relationship between email and postal mail. Postal mail used to be dominant, but now the number of messages handled by email in a day exceeds what the postal system processes in a year. The same could happen with finance.

Right now, the monthly active user count is around 10 million, which is at the same level as Mac users in 1987. Back then, Macs were a niche for enthusiasts, but now computers have become global infrastructure. Ethereum could end up following a similar path.

Given global financial crises and geopolitical risks, Ethereum is precisely where its strengths shine. Every time events like economic crises, pandemics, wars, or currency collapses occur, countries and individuals that have been excluded from mainstream financial systems tend to flow into Ethereum. About 10 countries have already been excluded from the financial system, and 30 to 50 have been marginalized. For them, Ethereum represents a whole new possibility.

Its security “moat” is also strong. For 10 years, there have been no large-scale outages or downtime. By comparison, Solana has experienced more than 10 major outages in 5 years, and Sui has had two outages in 2 years. Ultimately, competition comes down to who makes the fewest mistakes, and Ethereum has a decisive advantage in that regard.

It’s also worth noting that the possibility of surpassing Bitcoin is not something to ignore. Bitcoin is a currency system, but Ethereum is a currency system, a financial system, an internet system, and even a supercomputer shared by all humanity. Ethereum’s current inflation rate is also lower. In 2024, Ethereum’s inflation rate is -0.2% to 0.5%, which is lower than BTC’s 1.7%, gold’s 1.5%, and the U.S. dollar’s 3.3%.

In mid-2017, Ethereum’s market cap reached 80% of Bitcoin’s. In May 2021, it rose to 48%. It’s currently around 20%, but given Ethereum’s growth pace 10 years from now, this ratio could change dramatically.

Cathie Wood points out that by 2032, Ethereum’s price could reach $166,000 and its market cap could reach $20 trillion. Based on today’s market value, that means there is nearly 50x growth potential.

There are also two growth engines: ETF listings and staking. Starting this October, spot ETFs that support staking are expected to begin, allowing participants to earn about 3% additional annual yield. This will be the third growth engine.

Just as the AI industry cannot exist without Nvidia, and the mobile industry cannot exist without Apple, the crypto industry cannot thrive without Ethereum. If Ethereum becomes as widely adopted as the internet 10 years from now, both the number of users and the amount of capital could increase by 100 times. When you think about it that way, I really believe we are still at the very beginning.