Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi has stepped up his defense of Ethereum’s valuation, arguing that critics are using the wrong financial framework and that ETH should be analyzed more like early-stage Amazon than a mature “value” stock.
In a speech on the Milk Road Show on December 9, 2025, Qureshi revisited his now-viral valuation clash with investor Santiago “Santi” Santos, hosted by ThreadGuy, which reignited the debate over the valuation of Layer 1 blockchains. At the heart of Qureshi’s thesis is a uncomplicated but controversial claim: Fee revenue on Ethereum is actually pure margin and should be treated as profit, not “revenue” in a customary, corporate sense.
“Blockchains don’t bring in revenue. They make a profit,” he said. “When networks charge fees, that’s a profit. There’s no expense to the network. Networks don’t pay expenses, right? There’s no AWS hosting cost for Ethereum.”
Qureshi refutes claims that Ethereum is overvalued
Santos argued that Ethereum is trading at “over 300” times its sales, calling these price-to-sales (P/S) levels “embarrassing” compared to customary companies and suggesting valuations are “way ahead of their skis.” Qureshi did not dispute the size of the multiples, but rejected P/S as the correct lens.
“During the debate, he insisted that the right way to look at these things is the ask price. So if you look at the ask price of Ethereum, it’s around 380. If you look at Amazon, I think Amazon peaked at the ask price of 42. And that was during the bubble,” Qureshi said.
He countered that in the case of blockchain, what equity investors would call “sales” is closer to the GDP or total market value (GMV) of the blockchain economy, which is not directly measured at the protocol level. The only tidy, observable line is commission income, which he treats as net income.
“Sales, in a sense, is like blockchain GDP, which we don’t measure,” he argued. “For networks, you have to understand the profit… You have to understand what Ethereum’s profit is compared to Amazon’s profit.”
This opens the door to the Amazon analogy. Qureshi highlighted that Amazon delayed profitability for almost two decades to prioritize growth, and yet public markets continued to assign it extremely high earnings multiples.
“Amazon literally made no profit, no profit at all until about 20 years into the business,” he said. “I think it was 2013… Amazon had a PE ratio… over 600, whereas today Ethereum’s PE ratio is obviously around 380.”
Since Ethereum’s P/S and P/E converge under the “fees = profit” assumption, Qureshi argues that investors should compare ETH’s 300-380x multiple to Amazon’s P/E history, rather than the much lower P/S, if they intend to employ a single prime multiple at all.
He emphasized that the broader context is that Ethereum and other L1s are still in a phase of exponential growth, more akin to early internet infrastructure or e-commerce than late-cycle dividend payers.
“This technology is getting bigger and bigger over time. It is consuming the entire financial world from where it started,” he said, referring to his essay “In Defense of the Exponents.” “None of [these technologies] started printing loads of profits immediately within the first five or even ten years.”
Despite the volatile price action and underperformance of altcoins compared to AI stocks and gold, Qureshi said his confidence in the antiquated Ethereum thesis has grown, not weakened, as a result of the public debate.
“Anyway, I think I’ve gained more confidence,” he said, adding that nothing significant has changed in recent months to warrant a solemn rethink of the portfolio. “What exactly has changed in the last 2 months between, you know, ETH going to be $4,800 and ETH going to be $3,000? The answer is basically nothing.”
I shared with: some post-debate reflections on my L1 debate @santiagoroelmy rebuttal to the claim that “crypto is a big casino” and where I think we are in the crypto macroeconomics cycle 👇 https://t.co/9uMJFuLVrX
— Haseeb ＞|＜ (@hosseeb) December 9, 2025
According to Qureshi, true repositioning would require an explicit invalidation of underlying assumptions – such as a quantum collapse in cryptography or a structural breakdown in demand for on-chain stablecoins. In his view, short-term swings are simply a sentiment pendulum swinging around a still-established basic anchor.
His message to skeptics is that if markets tolerated Amazon at 600x earnings while it was scaling to a dominant platform, rejecting Ethereum at around 300-380x on the “too high P/S multiple” argument alone would be analytically incoherent.
At the time of publication, the price of ETH was $3,325.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
