Joseph Lubin, a co-founder of Ethereum and chief executive of Consensys, used an X post on 19 June to deliver what may be his most expansive valuation thesis yet for Ether. After praising a research note that likened ETH to “digital oil,” Lubin argued the author still “is not bullish enough” about Ethereum’s ultimate economic footprint.
“This is a very strong piece of work in so many ways,” he began. “Probably everyone who reads this work will learn something and be stoked by the thesis. But this top-tier thought piece has one major structural flaw—a pretty deep structural flaw: it is not bullish enough.”
Lubin devoted half of his post to a thought experiment first sketched on 4 June. “If there was a magical trust-diamond commodity and you could apply chips of this diamond to every transaction, agreement or relationship … how much value would that add? 10 % to global GDP? 100 %? 1,000 %? … The ticker of that commodity is ETH.”
Lubin regards such supply-side tightening as a preview, not a climax. “Both of these models,” he wrote of the digital-oil and trust-commodity frameworks, “will lead to a giant monetary premium for ETH.”
Whether Ether can plausibly “eclipse” worldwide output—a threshold no single asset has come close to—remains an open question. Lubin’s rhetorical diamond, however, sharpens the stakes: in a future where programmable trust becomes a primary input of production, valuing ETH merely as software gas may prove, to borrow his phrase, “not bullish enough.”
At press time, ETH traded at $2,523.
