While many investors have rejoiced at Bitcoin’s recent price upswings, others are betting that crypto’s second fiddle, Ether, will actually be the big winner of 2024.
While loud voices on Crypto Twitter have predicted the start of another bull run with Bitcoin’s recent resurgence, JPMorgan analysts just wrote in a new report that the coin is overbought.
The report took aim at one of the biggest drivers of Bitcoin’s recent rosy performance: the possibility that the Securities and Exchange Commission will approve several spot Bitcoin ETFs in early January.
View this interactive chart on Fortune.com
Some have predicted that the approval of spot ETFs from TradFi firms like BlackRock and Fidelity will drive billions of dollars of inflows to Bitcoin, but JPMorgan said this optimism is misplaced.
The bank pointed to weak demand for existing spot Bitcoin ETFs in Europe and Canada as evidence that the investment vehicle could fail to garner significant traction in the U.S. Instead of bringing in fresh capital, spot ETFs are likely to instead draw from capital already invested in Bitcoin-backed vehicles such as the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), Bitcoin futures ETFs, or Bitcoin mining companies.
If the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the world’s largest Bitcoin fund, in particular, is allowed to become a spot ETF, existing investors could take profits and remove as much as $2.7 billion from the exchange-traded fund. That could severely dent prices, the report said.
‘Recapture market share’
The report also claims that the upcoming Bitcoin halving, which will cut the mining reward in half, has already been priced in and will not give the coin the boost some expect.
On the other hand, the JPMorgan report said Ether could outperform Bitcoin in 2024 owing in part to an upcoming upgrade to the underlying Ethereum blockchain dubbed EIP-4844 or proto-danksharding. The update is meant to increase throughput and decrease gas fees charged to those who execute transactions on the network.
“We believe that next year Ethereum will reassert itself and recapture market share within the crypto ecosystem,” the analysts wrote.
As crypto prices have fallen over the past several months, funding dollars have dried up, and some VCs have cut the valuations of some of their biggest crypto bets by double digits. JPMorgan said it’s seen a “reinvigoration” of VC funding this quarter, although it still looks preliminary.
Still, analysts think a revival in venture capital activity in the crypto industry could make a meaningful difference. “To the extent this improvement continues into the first quarter of 2024,” the report continued, “that would represent a significant development that would herald in our opinion the end of the Crypto Winter.”
