Goldman Sachs said in a statement to customers Tuesday that the blockchain with the highest “real potential” is Ethereum, suggesting its ETH could become the dominant digital store of value.

As a result, according to a report from Business Insider, Goldman predicts that the total market cap of Ether (ETH) could exceed the total market cap of Bitcoin (BTC) in the coming years.

“[Ether] At the moment, Ethereum seems to be the cryptocurrency with the highest potential for practical use, the platform of which is native digital currency, which is the most popular development platform for smart contract applications. “

Smart contracts include software that enables the automatic execution of digital contracts, using technology that has enabled the explosion of decentralized financial protocols (DeFi) and decentralized applications.

Analysts note that Bitcoin’s first momentum advantage gave it a stronger brand, but it is believed that it lacks some of Ether’s use cases and the slow transaction speeds. Due to its focus on hard money and cybersecurity, Bitcoin does not yet offer the same functionality as Ethereum.

As a younger network, Ethereum can also grow faster than Bitcoin. While Bitcoin is up 261% over the past year, ETH is up 856% over the same period.

Analysts, while leaning towards Ethereum over Bitcoin, also argue that gold is a superior store of value over digital assets, describing gold as an “inflation hedge” and cryptocurrency.

“This competition between cryptocurrencies is another risk factor that prevents them from being safe havens during this time.”

The note came last month after analysts on Goldman Sachs’ Investment Strategy Team told their clients that cryptocurrencies are not even an “investable” asset class. Analysts said:

“While the digital asset ecosystem could revolutionize the future of things, it doesn’t mean that cryptocurrency is an investable asset class.”

Banks aren’t the only ones seeing Ethereum outperform Bitcoin in many ways. The founder and CEO of Celsius Network, a crypto lending and custody company with $ 17 billion in digital assets under management, told Kitco News on Monday that Ether outperformed Bitcoin in terms of stocks among the platform’s users has and believes it will be in the future world in 2022 or 2023.