Polymarket bettors currently assign a 74% chance that gold reaches $5,000 before Ethereum. Gold trades near $4,480, about 10% from the mark, while ETH remains below $3,000 amid 2025’s shifting flows and stalled momentum. In Q3 and July 2025, BitMine’s accumulation and spot ETH ETF inflows briefly lifted prices before fading.

Ripple executive Reece Merrick expects institutional involvement in crypto to grow sharply by the end of 2026, with major banks, asset managers and payment networks holding significant exposure. He links this outlook to regulatory clarity around stablecoins, the GENIUS Act, and Ripple’s shift in 2025 toward full-stack institutional infrastructure with products like RLUSD and tokenized T-Bills on the XRP Ledger.

In December 2025, Peter Schiff said Bitcoin faces four difficult years and argued the "digital gold" idea has failed. He cited BTC near $87,000 yet 46% lower versus gold from its November 2021 peak. Bloomberg's Mike McGlone described Bitcoin as "dead money," pointing to high risk without additional return over five years.

According to U.Today, BitMine's Ethereum treasury has exceeded 4 million ETH, representing roughly 3.37% of the total supply. The firm added over 500,000 ETH in the past 30 days and began its aggressive accumulation in early July 2025, while a Fundstrat outlook now projects ETH at $1,800–$2,000 in H1 2026, posing potential risks to its NAV.

A pseudonymous analyst has highlighted a descending resistance trendline and horizontal support on the XRP/WTI crude oil chart, with major resistance around 0.0440 and key support in the 0.0270–0.0290 area. XRP, which has been in a sharp three-month decline against oil, is now trading near 0.0335, just above an intermediate support level, and the analyst suggests a breakout above the diagonal line could trigger a strong rebound.

On December 22, 2025, a poll shared by Peter Schiff on X saw 59% of more than 21,000 participants choose Bitcoin over gold and silver for a hypothetical $100,000 investment held until 2028. Schiff continues to argue that Bitcoin diverts capital from precious metals, even as he highlights that gold has climbed from about $1,800/oz in November 2021 to around $4,400/oz while Bitcoin rose from $69,000 to roughly $88,000 over the same period.

Alex Thorn, Galaxy Digital's head of firmwide research, expects Bitcoin to reach $250,000 by the end of 2027. He cautioned that 2026 is hard to forecast and said options markets currently assign equal odds of $50,000 or $250,000 by the end of next year, reflecting heightened near‑term uncertainty.

Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox recently said he is bearish on Bitcoin because he believes its community culture has become closed to innovation and hostile to developers. He argued that even a strong technical design cannot survive if the surrounding culture rejects change, contrasting this with his goal of keeping Zcash highly open to evolution. His comments followed a dispute between Aleo CEO Alex Pruden and Bitcoin maximalist "Coinjoined Chris" over post-quantum security tools for Bitcoin.

A long-inactive Ethereum pre-mine address holding 2,000 ETH, valued at about $5.9 million, has moved again after more than a decade. The tokens were acquired during the first 14 days of the 2014 sale at a fixed rate of 2,000 ETH per 1 BTC, with the buyer paying exactly 1 Bitcoin (around $600). Other large wallets also reactivated on Dec. 1 and Dec. 10.