Bloomberg’s Mike McGlone on Ethereum, Trends and the Digitalization of Finance

Compute demand is two-sided, the precondition for any hedging market. Producers (neoclouds and independent data centers) fear their inventory clears below cost. Consumers (inference platforms and the agentic application layer) fear compute will get more expensive. The common read holds that nonfungibility keeps both off any general exchange, since a buyer wants a named SKU in a named region rather than a basket, so the trade stays bilateral and the only exchange users are dealers hedging their book. That describes launch conditions, but understates how commodity markets form. Canonical benchmarks get made through trading, and reservations standardize as the curve deepens. The dealer-intermediated structure is not the end state, it is the seed of one.