While the cryptocurrency didn’t perform that well in 2019, Ethereum (ETH) is one of the best-performing digital assets of all time, rallying from an ICO price under a dollar to the $160 where it is today.

Despite this jaw-dropping gain in and of itself, investors in the cryptocurrency believe it will go higher. So much higher than one analyst laid out a case for the cryptocurrency’s value to surge to $1 trillion, 13 digits.

For some perspective, a trillion-dollar Ethereum market capitalization at current price levels would equate to about a $9,000 ETH price, with the current supply in mind. The cryptocurrency reaching such lofty prices would require it to rally by over 5,000%. Crazy, right?

Could Ethereum Really Hit $1 Trillion?

In a January edition of the bankless newsletter published by Ethereum investor Ryan Sean Adams, a case for a 13-digit ETH market cap was laid out by Lucas Campbell of DeFi Rate.

The supporting evidence for this case was largely tied to economic bandwidth, specifically the idea that ETH (Ether) is “trustless economic bandwidth that can’t be replaced by any other asset on the Ethereum network.” In other words, the cryptocurrency is likely to be the reserve currency for the rest of the decentralized finance ecosystem.

Right now, DeFi protocols “consume 3% of ETH’s total economic bandwidth,” or 3% of the total supply in more layman’s terms.

But with demand for DeFi increasing, with there being protocols that require more Ethereum reserves to operate, and with there existing a multi-trillion-dollar addressable market for ETH (in money, financial services and derivatives, growth could be had:

“The traditional synthetics & derivatives market is $640T, imagine if 1% of that was trustless & built with ETH as bandwidth? The market cap for ETH could get in the double-digit trillions in scenarios like these.”

The trillion dollar case for ETH A bullish case for ETH as economic bandwidth powering a trustless economyhttps://t.co/fbzClLCAVi@0x_Lucas crushed it on this thought experiment Thread: — Ryan Sean Adams – rsa.eth ? (@RyanSAdams) January 16, 2020

ETH Could Follow Bitcoin’s Parabolic Path

That’s not all.

Trader CryptoWolf recently noted that if you stack the charts if Bitcoin’s early years and Ethereum from its inception, the latter is eerily following the path of the former, with the two cryptocurrencies having both seen an absurd return on investment since their earliest days.

This chart must not be ignored. pic.twitter.com/tjzEo6VFwT — Wolf (@IamCryptoWolf) January 10, 2020

His chart implies that if ETH continues to follow the path trailblazed by Bitcoin, it will surge by thousands of percent from here by the end of the decade, and potentially even higher, boding well for bulls.

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