As major cryptocurrencies lowered prices, longtime gold advocate Peter Schiff and crypto investor Andrew Kang grabbed the moment in which the recent rejection lays out warnings about the valuations and false optimism surrounding Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively.
The recent market background has given skeptics a voice. Ethereum is below $4,000, and Bitcoin has dumped some of its recent profits. This has resulted in a total cryptocurrency market capitalization falling by more than 6.6%.
Analysts disagree as to whether this marks the beginning of a longer recession or whether it is a “bear trap” within a continuous cycle.
Schiff governs years of skepticism
Schiff, chief economist and strategist at Euro Pacific Capital, has dismissed Bitcoin as “Digital Fool’s Gold” for many years. He updated his criticism this week by highlighting a decline in Michael Saylor’s strategy (formerly micro-strategy with ticker$MSTR).
“Leah, few have noticed that $MSTR has dropped by 45% from its height in November 2024. This will be a brutal bear market for Bitcoin finance companies. We don’t know if any of those that include MSTR will survive that.” Posted on x.
He recently pointed out that Bitcoin is falling. 20% against goldwe call it the evidence of the bear market.
Code bull under attack
Kang’s post was the result of Tom Lee’s recent comments on Ethereum. Tomley, co-founder of Fundstrat and chairman of Bitmine at a recent event, said Ethereum could be as high as $12,000 to $15,000 by the end of 2025, and could be driven by Wall Street recruitment and support from the encrypted Trump administration.
As Cryptopolitan reported, Lee described Ethereum as a “neutral chain” that can attract both banks and regulators, claiming that tokenized assets, stubcoins and even artificial intelligence would arrive in a decade-long “supercycle.”
Lee’s company Bitmine has restructured its balance sheet for Ethereum and now owns ETH 2.15 million, the world’s largest Treasury Department. The bet raised the market capitalization from $37.6 million in June to $9.45 billion by September.
His argument saw people have an opinion on the bullish, bearish side of Ethereum’s aisle chip. Kang, co-founder of Mechanism Capital, was one of the loudest voices when he launched. Detailed Rebuttal of xwho dismissed Lee’s paper as “one of the most financially illiterate arguments,” he saw from a well-known analyst.
Andrew Kang makes an anti-aggressive launch
Kang argues that the Ethereum foundations do not support such a high-level assessment. He pointed out that tokenization of actual assets and Stablecoin volumes has risen from “100 to 1,000 times” since 2020, but that network fee revenue has not expanded accordingly.
He said commission growth is limited due to efficient upgrades, the transition of activities to rival chains like Solana and Arbitrum, and low sales of tokenized bonds and securities. “You can tokenize $1 trillion worth of assets, but if it’s not moving around much, it might just add $100,000 worth of value to your ETH,” Kang writes.
He also rejected Lee’s claim that the institutions accumulate ETH to secure the network, saying that the major banks have not yet purchased or bet their assets.
Technically, Kang suggested that Ethereum would likely remain trapped in the $1,000-$4,800 range than it would infiltrate the new highs.
in I’ll post it laterhe went further and branded Ethereum “Luna 2.0”. This is a reference to the tera blockchain, where the collapse in 2022 wiped out billions of investor capital. He also reportedly places the option to put the money where his mouth is and bet on further declines in Ethereum.
However, it is worth noting that Kang is very bullish on Bitcoin and has been bearish on Ethereum for a long time. Some of his predictions about ETH’s imminent fate have failed in the past.