Shared some post-debate reflections on my L1 debate with @santiagoroel<\/a>, my rebuttal against the “crypto is all a big casino” doomers, and where I think we are in the crypto macro cycle ![\"\ud83d\udc47\"](\"https:\/\/s.w.org\/images\/core\/emoji\/16.0.1\/72x72\/1f447.png\")
https:\/\/t.co\/9uMJFuLVrX<\/a><\/p>\n
Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi has sharpened his defense of Ethereum\u2019s valuation, arguing that critics are using the wrong financial framework and that ETH should be analyzed more like an early-stage Amazon than a mature \u201cvalue\u201d stock.<\/p>\n
Speaking on the Milk Road Show on 9 December 2025, Qureshi revisited his now-viral valuation clash with investor Santiago \u201cSanti\u201d Santos, hosted by ThreadGuy, which reignited the debate over how to price layer 1 blockchains. At the core of Qureshi\u2019s thesis is a simple but controversial claim: fee revenue on Ethereum is effectively pure margin and should be treated as profit, not as \u201crevenue\u201d in the traditional corporate sense.<\/p>\n
\u201cBlockchains don\u2019t have revenue. They have profit,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen chains charge fees, that\u2019s profit. There\u2019s no expenses for a chain. Chains don\u2019t pay expenses, right? There\u2019s no AWS hosting cost for Ethereum.\u201d<\/p>\n
Santos had argued that Ethereum is trading at \u201c300 plus\u201d times sales, calling these price-to-sales (P\/S) levels \u201cembarrassing\u201d relative to traditional companies and suggesting valuations are \u201cway ahead of their skis.\u201d Qureshi did not contest the magnitude of the multiples but rejected P\/S as the right lens.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was insisting in the debate that the right way to look at these things is price of sales. So if you look at price sales for Ethereum, it\u2019s something like 380. If you look at Amazon, I think Amazon topped out at price of sales of 42. And this was during the bubble,\u201d Qureshi said.<\/p>\n
He countered that for a blockchain, what equity investors would call \u201csales\u201d is closer to the GDP or GMV of the on-chain economy, which is not directly measured at the protocol level. The only clean, observable line is fee income, which he treats as net income.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sales in some sense is like the GDP of the blockchain which we\u2019re not measuring,\u201d he argued. \u201cThe right thing to understand for a chain is the profit\u2026 The right thing to understand is what is the profit of Ethereum relative to the profit of Amazon.\u201d<\/p>\n
That opens the door to the Amazon analogy. Qureshi emphasized that Amazon delayed profitability for almost two decades to prioritize growth, yet public markets still assigned it extremely high earnings multiples.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmazon literally made no profit, no profit until basically about 20 years in as a business,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the year I think it was 2013\u2026 Amazon had a PE ratio\u2026 over 600 whereas today the PE ratio of Ethereum of course is something like 380.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because Ethereum\u2019s P\/S and P\/E converge under his \u201cfees = profit\u201d assumption, Qureshi\u2019s argument is that investors should compare ETH\u2019s 300\u2013380x multiple to Amazon\u2019s P\/E history, not to its much lower P\/S, if they are going to use a single headline ratio at all.<\/p>\n
The broader context, he stressed, is that Ethereum and other L1s are still in an exponential build-out phase, more akin to early internet or e-commerce infrastructure than to late-cycle dividend payers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis technology has been getting bigger and bigger over time. It\u2019s gobbling up the entire world of finance from where it started,\u201d he said, referencing his essay \u201cIn Defense of Exponentials.\u201d \u201cNone of [these technologies] started printing a bunch of profit immediately in the first five or even 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite choppy price action and underperformance of altcoins versus AI equities and gold, Qureshi said his conviction in the long-dated Ethereum thesis has increased, not weakened, through the public debate.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf anything, I have become more confident in my view,\u201d he said, adding that nothing material had changed in the last months to justify a major portfolio rethink. \u201cWhat exactly has changed in the last 2 months between, you know, ETH going to like $4,800 and ETH being at $3,000? The answer is basically nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Ethereum](\"https:\/\/www.newsbtc.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/ETHUSDT_2025-12-10_14-42-13.png?resize=1024%2C473\")
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