Biggest Bank in the World Says Ethereum Is ‘Digital Oil,’ Bitcoin ‘Digital Gold’: Report

The world’s biggest bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), is reportedly calling Bitcoin (BTC) “digital gold” and Ethereum (ETH) “digital oil.”

In a new report shared by Matthew Siegel, VanEck’s head of digital assets, the ICBC gives praise to the top two cryptocurrencies by market cap.

The report also says that market demand is strong for digital assets, pushing innovation in the sector.

“Market demand drives the continuous iteration of digital currencies.”

The report draws comparisons between Bitcoin and gold while also saying the crypto king has added benefits.

“Bitcoin retains the scarcity similar to gold through mathematical consensus, while solving its problem of being difficult to divide, difficult to identify authenticity and inconvenient to carry. Its monetary attributes are gradually weakening, while its asset attributes are constantly strengthening.”

In calling Ethereum “digital oil,” the report praises various characteristics of the top smart contract platform’s ecosystem. While ICBC highlights some of the network’s shortcomings, it also believes technological advances will resolve them over time.

“Ethereum has been continuously upgrading its technology in terms of security, scalability, and sustainability, providing technical power for the digital future…

Ethereum introduces Turing completeness with its exclusive programming language (Solidity) and virtual machine (EVM), allowing developers to write and arrange for a variety of complex smart contracts and applications, providing a strong platform support for blockchain technology. Its flexibility has been widely recognized in the fields of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT), and is gradually extending to the physical infrastructure network (DePin).

In essence, Ethereum’s Turing completeness enables it to execute any programming instructions under the premise of correct instructions and sufficient resources, but it also poses several practical problems…

Looking ahead, Ethereum developers will continue to work on finding the Pareto optimum between sustainability, security and efficiency.”

Bitcoin is trading for $66,502 at time of writing, down 5% in the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, Ethereum is trading for $3,464 at time of writing, down more than 6% on the day.

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