What if you bought Ethereum in 2018?
Crypto · Coin. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play4.0× · S&P 500 same money: $2,519
$1,000 in Ethereum at the start of 2018 would be worth about $4,000 today — 4.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Ethereum, proposed by a teenage Vitalik Buterin and launched in 2015, added programmability to the blockchain idea: smart contracts that let anyone issue tokens or build applications on a shared ledger. Early on, the 2016 hack of The DAO led to a controversial fork that created Ethereum Classic. Then Ethereum became the infrastructure of the 2017 ICO boom, in which startups raised billions by selling tokens, often with little more than a white paper. Ether's price soared to around $1,400 in January 2018; when most of those projects failed, it collapsed by more than 90 percent by December.
The network nevertheless kept building. Decentralised finance took off in the summer of 2020, NFTs boomed in 2021, and ether reached new highs. In September 2022 the Merge switched Ethereum from energy-hungry mining to proof of stake, cutting its electricity use by over 99 percent. US spot ether ETFs launched in 2024 and corporate treasury buyers arrived in 2025. Anyone who bought at the 2018 peak needed years just to break even, even though the technology itself thrived.
The lesson: A thriving network does not rescue a purchase made at the height of a mania; entry valuation can matter more than whether the underlying technology succeeds.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $750 | $4,000 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $130 | $23,077 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $23,077. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Ethereum is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in Crypto
- What if you bought Bitcoin?
- What if you bought Litecoin?
- What if you bought XRP?
- What if you bought Dogecoin?
- What if you bought BNB?
- What if you bought Cardano?