With spot Ethereum ETFs on the horizon in the United States, should existing Bitcoin ETF holders split their crypto holdings into ETH?

In a Twitter thread on Thursday, Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan offered three reasons for why this might be a good idea.

Why Bitcoin Holders Should Buy Ethereum

The first, Hougan wrote, is for the sake of diversification. Since predicting the future of crypto is difficult, holding a stake in both leading assets can provide investors relief in case one asset falls out of favor, or gobbles up the other over time.

โ€œAsk any investor from the dot-com boom who bought AOL Pets.com,โ€ Hougan said. โ€œThey got the overall bet rightโ€”the internet is going to be big!โ€”but the specifics wrong. Sad!โ€

As of writing, Bitcoinโ€™s market cap accounts for 55% of the entire crypto market, according to TradingView. Ethereum comprises 18.6%.

While ETH has performed generally flat against Bitcoin over the last five years, its dominance against the top crypto has slowly receded since the September 2022 merge. Still, the ETH/BTC ratio received a modest boost when approved to receive a U.S. spot ETF last month.

Secondly, Hougan said the fundamentally different nature of Bitcoin and Ethereum makes it difficult to choose between them. While Bitcoin is optimized towards being โ€œbetter money,โ€ Ethereum is designed for โ€œprogrammable moneyโ€ that enables blockchain applications like stablecoins and DeFi.

โ€œAdding some ETH to a majority BTC position gives you broader exposure to all the things public blockchains can do,โ€ he said.

BTC And ETH Perform Best Together

Lastly, Hougan said the historical performance of both assets shows that they work best when balanced together in a portfolio.

For example, a โ€œtraditionalโ€ 60/40 portfolio with a 5% crypto allocation had a higher cumulative return over the past four years when weighted 70/30 between BTC and ETH allocations (56.32%) than when allocated purely to BTC (54.49%).

Interestingly, it even had a lower โ€œmaximum drawdownโ€ than the BTC-only portfolio over that time, only pulling back 25.19% at its peak compared to 25.35%.

Nevertheless, Hougan said there is still a chief reason investors may want to stay BTC only.

โ€œItโ€™s very likely that Bitcoin is the dominant new form of โ€œmoneyโ€ that emerges in crypto,โ€ said Hougan, citing its massive existing lead and community orientation towards this market.

โ€œMoney is a massive market. There’s plenty of space for BTC to run if it succeeds,โ€ he said.

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