• Arthur Hayes has pitched his tent behind Ethereum against Solana.
• Hayes argued for owning “the most hated thing” at a turn in the market cycle.
• Ethereum’s price action continues to raise concerns in the short term.

Amid price struggles over the past two years, Ethereum has been reduced to a meme in cryptocurrency circles, written off by retail and institutional investors alike.

Well, retail and institutional investors, except BitMEX founder and Maelstrom Chief Investment Officer Arthur Hayes. Where others see a lost cause, Hayes sees opportunity, picking the asset over market rival Solana, one of the best-performing crypto assets of the past two years.

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Hayes has pitched his tent behind Ethereum against Solana. Speaking with Laura Shin on the “Unchained” podcast on April 8, the market analyst tipped Ethereum to outperform Solana in the market’s next potential move up.

“You want to own the most hated thing because that’s going to perform the best, and you don’t want to own the most loved thing from the previous cycle because that’s going to perform the worst,” he asserted, arguing that Ethereum offered a better risk to reward potential than Solana for investors with fresh capital coming into the market.

He stressed that this outlook did not mean that Solana would not also see significant gains but opined that it may not perform as well relative to Ethereum.

“I think ETH has the market fundamentals to do very well in this next leg up because people hate it so much, and so you know if it starts rising a lot in price, then you start getting ‘oh ETH’s back,’ and everyone forgets all the reason why they hated ETH in the previous cycle, and then they jump on the bandwagon,” he said.

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Another reason Hayes offered for backing Ethereum is an anticipated cool down of the memecoin frenzy on Solana in a potential market leg up.

“There will be some memecoins that do very, very well, but are we gonna go back to where we were 12 months ago where everybody and their mother was just like slinging memecoins trying to find the $1 million market cap that goes to $100 million market cap and just handing hundreds of millions of dollars in fees to Pump.fun? I don’t think we’re going back there,” he asserted.

Indeed, following several high-profile scandals, the most notable being the LIBRA saga, the Solana memecoin frenzy has significantly cooled down in recent weeks.

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According to Dune Analytics data, daily active wallets on Solana’s popular memecoin casino Pump.fun have dropped from highs of nearly 425,000 in January to barely 109,000 on April 11, a staggering 74% decline. At the same time, weekly volumes have tanked 73% from $3.3 billion to barely $900,000.

Nonetheless, in the short term, it is Ethereum’s underwhelming price performance that continues to attract wide concern. Amid recent market turbulence, the asset briefly dropped below the $1,400 price point—levels it first hit at the beginning of 2018.

“The fact that you can still buy ETH at 2017 levels? It’s either the market’s greatest joke – or its greatest opportunity,” Moonrock Capital CEO Simon Dedic lamented at the time.

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