Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead believes Ethereum has more potential than Bitcoin and the upcoming London hard fork will help Ether overtake Bitcoin as the most popular cryptocurrency.
Morehead said at the Reuters Global Markets Forum on Monday that Ether has more potential than Bitcoin because it is a newer cryptocurrency.
He said that the newest Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 upgrade will enable the digital token trade more like a fixed asset.
EIP 1559, one of five EIPs included in the ETH London upgrade, is a planned update to Ethereum’s present fee structure, imposing a minimum payment for submitting Ethereum transactions and moving away from a bidding mechanism in which miners prefer the highest bids.
The EIP 1559 improvement, which is designed to programmatically alter fees such that users pay the lowest bid for each block, might make Ether a deflationary asset.
“You’ll see a change of people who want to hold money doing so in Ether rather than Bitcoin,” Morehead said, adding that the cryptocurrency’s transition to Ethereum 2.0 will dramatically cut Ether’s mining energy usage compared to Bitcoin’s.
He believes that Ethereum’s widespread use in decentralized finance applications will help it grow larger than Bitcoin.
Despite his predictions for a brighter future for Ether, Morehead remains positive about Bitcoin’s future growth. According to reports, the CEO forecast that Bitcoin would trade between $80,000 and $90,000 by the end of 2021, with a year-end price of $120,000.
According to Morehead, rising popular use might push Bitcoin’s price above $700,000 in the next decade.
Ether, which was launched in 2015 and has a market valuation of $290 billion at the time of writing, is the second most valuable cryptocurrency.
The Ethereum London, which is set to take place on Wednesday, is one of the most significant Ethereum upgrades, with the goal of transitioning the blockchain from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, which means that the network will rely on staking rather than mining. Bitcoin, which was launched in 2009, is based on the PoW consensus method.
Morehead isn’t the only one who believes Ethereum will eventually outperform Bitcoin. In late June, Mike Novogratz, the founder and CEO of crypto investment firm Galaxy Digital, projected that Ether would one day become the “largest cryptocurrency.”
