Emre Yumlu 
Ether’s Performance Against Bitcoin at Its Lowest in Nearly 5 Years: Is ETH a ‘Completely Dead’ Investment?
Declining Appeal of ETH as an Investment
The decline in Ether’s investment appeal is attributed to layer-2 (L2) networks draining value from the main Ethereum network and a lack of community pushback against excessive token creation, according to a crypto venture capitalist.
Nic Carter, partner at Castle Island Ventures, stated in a March 28 post, “The number one cause of this is greedy L2s siphoning value from L1 and the social consensus that excess token creation was A-OK.”
“ETH died by its own hand,” Carter said. “ETH was buried under an avalanche of its own tokens. It died by its own hand.” This statement was made in response to Lekker Capital founder Quinn Thompson’s claim that Ether is a “completely dead” investment.
Thompson posted on March 28:
“A $225 billion market cap network seeing declines in transaction activity, user growth, and fees/revenues. There’s no investment case here. As a network with utility? Yes. As an investment? Absolutely not.”
ETH/BTC Ratio Hits Historic Low
The ETH/BTC ratio, which measures Ether’s relative strength compared to Bitcoin, dropped to 0.02260, marking its lowest level in nearly five years, according to TradingView data.
At the time of publication, Ether was trading at $1,894, down 5.34% in the past seven days, according to CoinMarketCap.
Meanwhile, in September 2024, it was reported that Ethereum’s fee revenue had “collapsed” by 99% over the previous six months as “extractive L2s” absorbed all the users, transactions, and fee revenue without contributing to the base layer.
At the same time, Cinneamhain Ventures partner Adam Cochran suggested that Based Rollups could solve the issue of Ethereum’s L2 networks pulling liquidity and revenue from the blockchain’s base layer. Cochran said Based Rollups could “directly impact Ethereum’s monetization model by making a pretty fundamental change to incentive structures.”
Investment Outlook for Ether Deteriorates: $10,000 to $4,000 Downgrade and Bullish Views
At the end of last year, there was optimism that Ether could reach $10,000 by 2025, especially after it touched $4,000 in December, coinciding with Bitcoin crossing $100,000 for the first time. However, since then, Ether has experienced a sharp decline, along with the broader crypto market downturn.
Standard Chartered revised its 2025 end-of-year ETH price estimate from $10,000 to $4,000, cutting it by 60% in a client letter on March 17.
However, some crypto traders, including pseudonymous figures Doctor Profit and Merlijn The Trader, are “insanely bullish” and argue that Ether could be the “best opportunity in the market.”
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