Ethereum Meant To Be Alternative, Not Rival to Bitcoin: ETH Co-Founder Anthony Di Iorio

Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio shared Thursday that he thinks the blockchain wasn’t necessarily meant to be a “competitor to Bitcoin,” but rather “it was meant to be an alternative.”

Speaking to a crowd at Consensus 2025, Di Iorio shared with the audience about his time during Ethereum’s early days, noting back then that he understood that the project could become a really big movement. “We could sense and feel that it was picking up,” Di Iorio said.

Di Iorio was one of the eight co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain, but originally got into cryptocurrency through his advocacy with Bitcoin. He started Bitcoin meetups in Toronto in 2012, and through that met Vitalik Buterin, who came up with the Ethereum whitepaper and shared it with his fellow co-founders.

While Di Iorio is still a big Bitcoin proponent, he has said that “I do think eventually Ethereum has a possibility of overtaking it in terms of market capitalization.”

“With the amount of use cases, and the value that Ethereum is allowing to be created, I think it has that opportunity, in order to possibly overtake it,” Di Iorio added.

After stepping away from the Ethereum Foundation, Anthony Di Iorio founded Decentral in 2014, which is best known for creating the Jaxx Liberty crypto wallet. In 2022, he launched Andiami, a project blending hardware, tokenomics, and game theory to tackle centralization vectors within decentralized networks.