Rahul Rai said he "wouldn't be surprised" if this event happened within the current bull cycle.
A 24-year-old who recently sold his crypto hedge fund for a whopping $35 million has predicted that Ether's market cap will overtake Bitcoin's in 2022.
Speaking to Markets Insider, Rahul Rai said he "wouldn't be surprised" if this event — long referred to as "the flippening" in crypto circles — happened within the current bull cycle.
Rai added that it's "very tough to predict" when the bull run will end, but at present, he anticipates it'll run until the middle of next year.
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The Case for Ether
There are a number of bullish factors working in Ether's favor right now.
Despite stiff competition from rival Layer 1 networks, the Ethereum blockchain remains the most-popular destination for collections of non-fungible tokens and decentralized finance protocols.
We've also seen Ether's share of the total crypto market cap surge dramatically in recent years.
Over the past 12 months, ETH's dominance has rallied from 11.5% to 19.5%, while BTC's has plunged from 64.4% to 42.8%.
Some analysts will undoubtedly argue that talk of a flippening is incredibly ambitious. Even though Ether's year-to-date gains of over 500% are well ahead of Bitcoin, it has a market cap of $560 billion. That pales in comparison to BTC's current valuation of $1.25 trillion.
Rai added that, in the long run, Bitcoin is shaping up to be digital gold, meaning that its eventual market cap will be on par with the precious metal.
By contrast, he pointed to how Ethereum's programmable nature means that it has a much broader range of use cases — arguing it could play a starring role as companies including Facebook turn their attention to the metaverse. Rai said:
"Ethereum is trying to power the rails of all of global finance in the future, and that is a much bigger market … If it does succeed, and if the thesis plays out, then the market value is going to capture trillions of dollars in global activity, and that's a much bigger market than (what) Bitcoin's going up (toward.)"
ETH is outperforming BTC on a seven-day timeframe, and hit a new all-time high of $4,762.30 in the early hours of Monday morning.
