Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi has doubled down on his defense of Ethereum’s valuation, arguing that critics are fundamentally misinterpreting how to evaluate Layer-1 blockchains. Speaking on the Milk Road Show on 9 December 2025, Qureshi compared Ethereum’s economic model to Amazon’s early growth era, not to mature value stocks.
His comments revisited a widely discussed valuation debate with investor Santiago “Santi” Santos, hosted by ThreadGuy, which reignited discussion about the appropriate way to price blockchain networks. Qureshi’s core thesis challenges traditional financial frameworks by asserting that Ethereum’s fee revenue should be treated as profit, not as corporate revenue.
“Blockchains Don’t Have Revenue. They Have Profit.”
Qureshi argued that critics misunderstand Ethereum’s economic structure because blockchains do not operate like traditional companies.
“Blockchains don’t have revenue. They have profit,” he said. “When chains charge fees, that’s profit. There are no expenses for a chain. Chains don’t pay expenses. There’s no AWS hosting cost for Ethereum.”
This perspective directly counters Santos’s criticism that Ethereum trades at over 300x sales, making it appear overpriced by conventional P/S metrics. Santos had previously called Ethereum’s P/S ratio “embarrassing,” suggesting that ETH valuations were “way ahead of their skis.”
Why Qureshi Rejects the Price-to-Sales Lens
Qureshi acknowledged that Ethereum trades at high multiples but argued that P/S is the wrong metric for valuing blockchains. He said that Ethereum’s “sales” should be viewed not as protocol revenue but as the GDP or GMV of the on-chain economy, a figure that cannot be directly measured.
“The sales in some sense is like the GDP of the blockchain which we’re not measuring,” he explained. “The right thing to understand for a chain is the profit… the profit of Ethereum relative to the profit of Amazon.”
Because blockchains do not have traditional expenses, Qureshi treats fee income as net income, making Ethereum’s price-to-earnings and price-to-sales effectively identical.
The Amazon Analogy: Early Growth, High Multiples
Using Amazon as a parallel, Qureshi highlighted that the e-commerce giant operated without profitability for nearly two decades, yet public markets still assigned it extremely high valuation multiples.
“Amazon literally made no profit until about 20 years in as a business,” he said. “In 2013, Amazon had a PE ratio over 600, whereas today the PE ratio of Ethereum is something like 380.”
By this logic, Ethereum is more comparable to high-growth internet infrastructure in its expansion phase, not to mature dividend-paying companies. Qureshi emphasized that Ethereum’s valuation should be viewed through the lens of long-term growth, network adoption, and increasing economic activity on-chain.
Ethereum Still in Early-Stage Build-Out
Qureshi concluded that Ethereum and other major L1s remain in an exponential development cycle, similar to the early internet and early-stage Amazon. Using traditional corporate valuation frameworks, he argued, risks distorting the economic reality of decentralized networks.
His comments have added renewed depth to one of the most important ongoing debates in crypto: how to accurately value blockchains as economic systems rather than traditional companies.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments are volatile and risky. Always conduct your research before making any investment decisions
