With the crypto sector looking red hot and on the verge of heating up even more, investors are looking to assets like Ethereum (ETH 0.48%) and World Liberty Financial (WLFI) for their next shot at a big, life-changing return that could make them into millionaires.

One question here is which asset gives investors multiple, durable ways to capture value as the crypto economy expands. The other question is whether either of them can deliver the gargantuan returns that investors are hoping for. Let’s answer both of those inquiries.

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Ethereum is a value compounding machine

As the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, with a value of about $505 billion, Ethereum is the anchor of the sector’s decentralized finance (DeFi) segment, with the largest pool of capital, the most expansive ecosystem of decentralized applications (dApps), and the biggest populations of app developers, investors, and users in all of crypto. With those advantages, all of which have been long-lived and fairly durable against its competitors, it’s no surprise why the coin’s value rose by more than 1,090% during the past five years alone.

Ethereum’s DeFi total value locked (TVL) is near $95 billion, alongside a stablecoin float of $159 billion, and also daily fee generation of about $1.8 million.Those are a trio of undeniably strong indicators that real activity continues to settle on the chain.

To power the next leg of growth across those metrics, the chain is decently positioned to capture value from the trend toward real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. If you’re not familiar, asset tokenization is just the process of encoding the ownership data about an asset like stocks or real estate onto a crypto token so that it can be tracked and traded on a blockchain.

Today, the tokenized real-world assets segment is larger than $30 billion across networks, but many asset managers see it growing to be worth trillions during the next five years or so. On Ethereum specifically, tokenized assets are measurably growing from day to day, giving investors a line of sight to realizing the benefits of even more activity that should persist beyond market cycles.And that will make its ecosystem even more valuable, and likely force the price of the coin up along the way.

One caveat before we analyze World Liberty Financial. Even if Ethereum has another 10-fold move during the next five years, it will be very hard to make $1 million with it, unless of course you’re willing to invest a large sum like $100,000, which most investors don’t have on hand anyway.

World Liberty Financial is optimized for hype

World Liberty Financial is a Trump family-associated crypto business that currently has one product, its USD1 (USD1 -0.05%) stablecoin. When holders swap or transfer their USD1, it generates fees for World Liberty. But there’s a critical catch here that is likely to prevent the World Liberty Financial token from gaining value when those fees are earned.

World Liberty Financial’s governance token paper is clear about what holders own when they buy the token.

The token is not equity, it does not entitle holders to dividends or a right to control any portion of the company’s assets, and the corporation is not actually controlled by the governance token holders. Thus the company’s successes do not have any credible path to actually increase the value of the token.

Votes are screened, implementation of voting is via company-controlled venues, and any tokenholder votes can be suspended by management due to “security risks,” with only the founders receiving revenue or upside. Said plainly, WLFI is a limited-purpose governance token where the issuer retains extremely broad discretion, and that isn’t a setup that can be reasonably expected to compound value for outside investors; it’s a setup that preserves control for insiders.

Furthermore, if USD1 usage grows, it will still compete with many other more established fiat currency-backed stablecoins that already enjoy deep integrations and brand trust, making differentiation difficult. Thus if World Liberty Financial rallies, it will likely be because of its Trump family business narrative rather than durable fundamentals. There is not any indication that such a rally would be able to send the token to the moon and make investors into millionaires.

So in the end, the verdict here is that investors who are seeking multi-year wealth building rather than a lucky pump, Ethereum is the clear pick, even if it isn’t going to make anyone into a millionaire. World Liberty may pop if the right headlines get published, but its governance structure and lack of a differentiated financial product make it very unlikely to be a long-term millionaire-maker.