Since Bitcoin's surge last year, high-level financial organisations have placed a far greater premium on its value. While corporations such as Microstrategy and Tesla have invested heavily in the leading digital asset, Ethereum is still far behind in terms of adoption.

However, Coinbase, a NASDAQ-listed cryptocurrency exchange, recently announced plans to invest millions in the purchase of Ether, among other altcoins.

Even still, even businesses with no crypto-allegiances are not rushing to add ETH to their balance sheets. This circumstance, however, may soon alter, according to Ryan Selkis.

During a recent podcast, the CEO of Messari predicted that Ethereum will soon gain institutional acceptance. Why? Because new crypto-assets have a half-life. He stated,

“The first asset that almost all new customers will likely accumulate for their treasury or as part of an investing strategy will almost certainly be Bitcoin, followed by Ether.”

It also boils down to their value propositions, which include digital gold vs. token interest in the "financial Internet," according to the exec. In that regard, he noted, "Ethereum has actual transaction volumes and real apps that are running on top of it."

Given that both networks are leaders in their respective industries, there may come a point in the future when their market capitalisation are identical. Selkis stated that such a scenario would be interesting.

“You're going to have Bitcoin and Ethereum maximalists at each other's throats, arguing in perpetuity about a fictitious contract and a fictitious dispute over two completely distinct things that happen to be the same size.”

However, he remarked that it would make Ethereum a "far better trade."

According to many proponents, Ethereum flipping Bitcoin, or "flippening," is a matter of time. Selkis, on the other hand, believes that market capitalisation and price comparisons should be avoided because they are "most irrelevant criteria."

“Even on Coinbase, we observed greater trading volume on Ethereum last quarter than on Bitcoin, and one could easily argue that Ethereum is already more popular than Bitcoin based on transaction volume or any other number of metrics.”

Ethereum is the world's most widely used blockchain, owing to the millions of apps and platforms created on top of it. Due to the fact that the network's native token is used for payment, the volume of ETH transactions has inevitably been higher than that of BTC. The majority of users actually favour the latter as a means of storing value.

Nonetheless, the analyst was not entirely effusive in his praise for Ethereum. While ETH 2.0 appears to be nearing completion, Selkis feels the project's shift to Proof-of-Stake may still face "execution risk." Additionally, he stated,

“I don't believe Ethereum is the clear winner when it comes to resolving decentralised finance transactions or any form of value transfer, whether it's NFTs or currencies.”

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