Is This Cryptocurrency Still a Millionaire Maker?

Though it's down by 33% over the last five years, Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) climbed from about $130 in early 2020 to over $4,800 in early November 2021, which would have been sufficient to turn an investment of $27,000 into about $1 million. It's natural for investors to wonder if another historic run is in the cards for the coin, given that it's more widely known now than it was then.

Today, with a market cap of $292 billion as of Sept. 15, Ethereum can still grow your wealth substantially, but it probably won't be a millionaire maker for those with small positions anytime soon. Let's first look at the math to see why, then examine its upcoming catalysts.

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A 100x gain would value Ethereum at $29 trillion

Ethereum isn't going to be a millionaire-maker investment from here, even if you're willing to pony up a lot more capital than most investors have on hand or are willing to allocate to a lottery ticket, and even if it becomes the next cryptocurrency to explode.

Turning $10,000 into $1 million requires a 100x gain, which would boost Ethereum's market cap to $29.2 trillion.

The entire crypto sector's market cap is currently around $2.7 trillion. Even if the entire sector expands by 10 times its current value over the next 10 years, as many are predicting, that won't be anywhere near enough to make a $10,000 Ethereum stake worth $1 million.

And time won't fix that problem, even if you have a lot of patience. So Ethereum's millionaire-maker days are behind it.

How Ethereum could still build wealth over the long term

Don't let this discourage you from owning Ethereum. There's still a clear path for the cryptocurrency to be a good wealth-building instrument to hold for years and years.

One major emerging trend is tokenization, the process of recording ownership of assets such as stocks and Treasury bonds in crypto tokens. Ethereum hosts $17.3 billion of these tokenized assets as of mid-September. In 2024, the McKinsey consultancy estimated that there would be on the order of $2 trillion in tokenized assets by 2030, up from $38.9 billion today, so Ethereum could capture a huge proportion of the inflows if it maintains its share of the tokenized asset market.

Another major growth driver, on-chain AI agents that use the network to store their money and purchase or sell goods and services, is also taking off right now. There are already more than 31,215 agents registered on Ethereum. While it's currently difficult to determine exactly how much those agents are transacting, the odds of their activity increasing as more agents are onboarded and as agents become more sophisticated are quite high.

Between tokenized assets and agents boosting activity, a lot of value will move across Ethereum's network, which will make its coin more valuable. Over the long run, it'll likely multiply in value -- just not by the same order of magnitude that'd be necessary to make someone with a small stake into a millionaire.

Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.