Bitwise's Matt Hougan Says Ethereum And Solana Are Betting On Opposite Valuation Models, 'My Favorite Approach Is Just To Own Them Both'

Bitwise chief investment officer (CIO) Matt Hougan said it was still an open question if Ethereum’s (ETH) monetary positioning or Solana’s (SOL) revenue-driven positioning would prove more valuable and that he liked to hold both."I think there's a pretty fascinating thing going on in the market between ETH and Solana, with one positioning on a monetary side, one positioning more on a revenue-driven side," Hougan said during an interview with The Rollup on Thursday. He said it was "indeterminate at this point" which valuation approach would win eventually, or whether both could.Those were fundamental decisions that led to downstream decisions on how the protocols ran and went to market, he said. "My favorite approach is just to own them both." was down by 2% during the past 24 hours. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around ETH remained in the ‘neutral’ zone, while chatter around it moved from ‘normal’ to ‘high’ over the past day. was also down by 2% during the past 24 hours. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around ETH remained in the ‘extremely bullish’ zone, while chatter around it stayed at ‘high’ levels over the past day.Monetary Bet Versus RevenueHougan made the comments after he and Ryan Rasmussen, Head of Research, were asked to take the over or under on an $8,000 ETH price target by 2030. Both took the over with Hougan noting nuance in how the asset was valued.The pair also spoke about a Bitcoin (BTC) target of $180,000 by 2030. Rasmussen advised investors not to set bullish price targets on every crypto asset, noting that markets moved slower than investors expected. was down by over 2% during the past 24 hours. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around BTC remained in the ‘bullish’ zone, while chatter around it stayed at ‘high’ levels over the past day.Interest in ETH was growing on the back of stablecoins and tokenization, the executives said, but the starting point for investors remained Bitcoin. Rasmussen said investment committees building model portfolios for financial advisors would start with Bitcoin, then perhaps add ETH and SOL, probably on a market-cap weighted basis.Follows August Revenue MemoThe comments come after a memo published earlier this month that argued that crypto valuations outside of Bitcoin can double and more as protocols funnel revenue to token holders through buybacks and burns.In that memo, Hougan said Bitcoin was a monetary asset that didn’t generate income for its holders, and that investors had wrongly applied that same assumption to the rest of the market. “We’re seeing base-layer networks moving toward revenue capture,” he said, citing Solana’s SGP-0003 governance process, which bundles proposals to increase fee burns and reduce issuance.