$ETH went from a consensus hold to a contrarian bet in 2-3 years.

Some of this was market driven, some was self-inflicted:

1) The EF pushed the L2 scaling roadmap after failing to scale the L1.

It doesn't matter whether that came from lack of motivation, skills, or available tech and research at the time.

Now the EF is scaling the L1, but even with gas limit increases, Ethereum will never be faster or cheaper than most competitors.

And that's okay, because maximizing decentralization and censorship resistance requires tradeoffs.

The problem is that market participants are giving it lower valuation multiple than in the past.

And it's dead annoying though that full ERC-20 deposits to CEXs still take ~13 minutes (no 1-slot confirmation) and that approve + action still requires two txs across DeFi, despite years of 'account abstraction' upgrades.

Watching EF members leave one by one isn't helping the sentiment either.

2) Ethereum can be slower and pricier than other chains, but the market now wants revenue to back valuations.

$HYPE is generating 2x-3x the fees of Ethereum despite trading at ~5% of its market cap.

Even more humiliating is $TRX, up 5x while ETH is down 40% over 5 years.

Ethereans mocked TRX as a copy/paste vaporware scam, but Tron dominates retail stablecoin payments... The sector EF pushed for years and failed to capture, because Ethereum was simply too expensive and slow for adoption.

Ouch.

I believe Ethereum had it good with the ultrasound money narrative.

Quickly deflating supply is the sexiest narrative that even BTC bulls would love.

But it needs a massive pick up in txs numbers to generate the fees that burn ETH.

And Glamsterdam just cut fees by ~78% (gas limit will go from 60M to 200M per block), which means transactions need to pump by 4.6x just to keep the burn flat.

If onchain activity doesn't pick up to compensate, Ethereum's revenue drops further.

Sure, Ethereum still dominates TVL but the ratio dropped from 96% in Jan 2021 to 52% today.

And even with that, TVL monetization mostly flows to protocols and stablecoin issuers, not the L1.

L2s aren't taxes either.

----

So what's the bullish case for Ethereum here?

EF has partly got the message.

The cypherpunk manifesto is personally very appealing to me, with its mission to promote privacy, self-sovereignty, and independence in an increasingly unstable world.

I hope that recent departures from the EF is simply a realignment period.

Pivoting to L1 scaling is the also right move, but UX needs to drastically improve, especially as more corpo-slop chains and institutions enter the market.

EF is taking the quantum threat seriously, unlike the mixed reaction from Bitcoin core devs.

But that all takes time, and if the market's demand for revenue doesn't subside, Ethereum simply needs to bring more users and transactions to the chain.

The real ultrasound money narrative, while being the most decentralized chain, would do the trick.

But we're far from ETH being deflationary again.

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