Is ETH the Future of Money?

In a YouTube video released at the start of May, Tom Lee, chairman of Bitmine Immersion Technologies [BMNR], argued that ethereum [ETH] represents the future infrastructure of money.

He prefaced his thesis by quoting Elon Musk: “the system won’t use dollars as currency in the future. Just mass and energy.”

Lee glossed this as meaning that, going forward, compute and energy will be the world’s two truly scarce assets. BlackRock [BLK] CEO Larry Fink recently expressed a similar conviction, predicting that ‘compute’ will become an entirely new asset class.

The practical expression of this shift is the expansion of decentralised finance (DeFi) and tokenisation.

DeFi refers to blockchain-based financial services – such as lending, trading and payments – that operate without traditional intermediaries like banks. Tokenisation is the process of turning real-world assets or financial rights into digital blockchain tokens that can be traded, transferred or used within those DeFi systems.

This is where ether [ETH] comes in.

ETH is the native asset of the ethereum network, which provides a programmable settlement layer for a large share of today’s tokenised financial activity, particularly stablecoins and decentralised applications.

The investment case is no longer purely speculative. Rather, ethereum is positioned as a potential settlement layer for tokenised finance – spanning stablecoins, Treasury products, equities, derivatives and payments. Under that scenario, demand for ETH is linked not just to crypto market cycles, but to the scale of on-chain financial activity itself.

Lee pointed to this dynamic through the relationship between ETH and total value locked (TVL) in DeFi, arguing that network usage has historically moved alongside price performance. While it is not a stable one-to-one relationship, TVL is often used as a proxy for on-chain economic activity. Lee framed the thesis succinctly: “If ETH is the leading tokenisation platform, its price will go up a lot.” In other words, the more capital flows into ethereum-based systems, the more demand there will be for blockspace, and therefore for ETH.

We should take Lee’s pronouncements with a grain of salt. Having gone public in June 2025, Bitmine has established itself as a leading ETH-focused digital asset treasury, as CMC Aureon recently unpacked in detail. It has set a public target described as the “alchemy of 5%”, and ultimately aims to control around 5% of all ETH in existence. Lee thus has an (extremely) vested interest in boosting ETH’s public profile. Nonetheless, there are a number of reasons to think that DeFi’s TVL will continue to grow, and with it ETH.

AI and the on-chain economy

A central plank of this thesis is the rise of agentic artificial intelligence (AI). As AI systems become more autonomous, they increasingly need to transact – paying for data, APIs, computation and services in real time.

Conventional banking systems are poorly suited to real-time machine-to-machine commerce, particularly across borders. By contrast, stablecoins and smart contracts allow AI agents to send payments, settle transactions and execute predefined agreements automatically, without requiring human oversight.

As Coinbase [COIN] CEO Brian Armstrong recently wrote on X, “Very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions. They can’t open a bank account, but they can own a crypto wallet.” In fact, on 11 February Coinbase launched a product that caters to just this development, described as “the first wallet infrastructure built specifically for agents.”

The convergence between AI and blockchain is being driven by several other complementary dynamics. One is transparency: while AI systems are often criticised for hallucinations and opaque “black box” decision-making, blockchain technology can provide immutable audit trails that record an agent’s actions in a tamper-resistant way.

Another is identity. Traditional online accounts are designed for humans, not autonomous software agents. Blockchain-based decentralised identities allow AI agents to possess cryptographic credentials that verify their permissions and authenticity across platforms, reducing the risk of spoofing or malicious interference.

Finally, blockchain could underpin trustless collaboration between AI systems themselves. If multiple autonomous agents owned by different entities need to cooperate, distributed ledgers can act as neutral settlement layers – potentially giving rise to decentralised “agent marketplaces” in which software programs securely hire, pay and transact with one another.

What a time to be alive.

Why Ethereum specifically?

While there are a number of competing layer-1s and application-specific chains, ethereum is perhaps the most suitable blockchain for agentic AI. Here’s why.

First is its composability and liquidity. Ethereum’s mature ecosystem of stablecoins, lending protocols and decentralised exchanges reduces friction for agents that need to move between services without constantly bridging assets or fragmenting liquidity across ecosystems.

Second is its standardisation. Ethereum’s ERC standards allow identity, assets and permissions to be expressed in interoperable formats, making it more feasible for autonomous agents to maintain persistent reputations and credentials across applications.

Third is its settlement neutrality. In a world where autonomous agents may operate across competing institutions, ethereum’s decentralisation provides stronger guarantees of censorship resistance and rule consistency than more permissioned or centrally influenced alternatives.

Finally, ethereum’s operational maturity – as the most widely used smart contract platform – reduces execution risk for systems that are intended to run continuously and autonomously.

Conclusion

If ethereum becomes the dominant settlement and coordination layer for autonomous agents, ETH will be the native economic asset required to access and secure that infrastructure.

In that scenario, demand for ETH will be structurally tied to the scale of machine-to-machine economic activity. As AI agents proliferate and begin transacting autonomously, usage of the underlying ethereum network would increase in parallel, potentially embedding a more persistent demand floor for ETH.

This also reframes ETH’s valuation dynamics relative to competing DeFi or alternative layer-1 ecosystems. If ethereum retains its position as the most liquid, standardised and credibly neutral base layer, then network effects may increasingly concentrate economic activity – and therefore fee demand – within ETH’s ecosystem, rather than dispersing it across fragmented chains.

From an investment perspective, the bull case is therefore that ethereum captures growth in crypto markets and ETH is exposed to a broader structural shift in digital economic activity itself: the rise of autonomous, always-on software agents transacting on-chain at scale.

So is ETH the future of money? That might be going a bit far. But if autonomous agents and real-world assets increasingly settle on-chain, ethereum is already positioned as one of the clearest beneficiaries of that transition.

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