Author: Reid

Translation: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

When you don't want to blame those who have turned Ethereum into what it is today, you say, "ETH deserves its market cap limit." But the reason this limit is what it is now involves specific people and specific dates, not some abstract coordination theory.

Before making accusations, let me state this: As an early financier, I am still developing on Ethereum. I respect its vision and liquidity.

At the same time, I am also a disgruntled holder who is trapped, and that is the crux: this is an insider speaking the truth, not a Solana cheerleader throwing stones from the sidelines.

Not in Power, Yet Honorably Retired

At some point between 2021 and 2023, the discourse of the Ethereum Foundation underwent a shift.

"We are building" morphed into "We are infrastructure."

Vitalik's focus shifted from the Casper specification to articles on diversity, plural identities, and network nations.

David Hoffman's notion of a "credible neutral, generously noble image" is exactly the rhetoric that mature institutions use to justify their retreat.

This is acting like a person in power before you even have the position. In the market, your stance leads to results. Acting like a winner before you win is exactly why challengers take your job.

Ethereum did not win the chairmanship, yet it has already positioned itself as an honorably retired chairperson, and the price chart reflects this precisely: since the merger, ETH has decreased in price against BTC by about 65%.

Environmental Campaigning as a Signal

The core marketing of the merger is the reduction of energy consumption by 99.95%. Go check the Ethereum official website. This choice exposes the Ethereum Foundation's communication targets: they are talking to their own conscience, not to the market. Institutions want profits. Developers want certainty. Users want cheaper transactions.

By not promoting user experience but promoting ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), it indicates that Ethereum is responding to questions that capital does not even raise.

For years, ESG critics and climate activists have exploited carbon emission issues to attack PoW. This attack has no effect on Bitcoin because it is baseless, and more importantly, those allocating capital don't care at all.

Ethereum has spent its most significant narrative moment defending against a toothless attack instead of promoting speed and profitability. Meanwhile, Solana is promoting speed.

Seven Years of Birth Pains

Proof of Stake (PoS) has been on the roadmap since Ethereum launched in 2015. Vitalik was discussing the slasher algorithm as early as early 2014. The merger did not materialize until September 15, 2022. Seven years from release has spanned two complete crypto cycles.

Solana launched its mainnet beta in March 2020. While Ethereum spent its maximum narrative window delivering PoS, Solana delivered wallets, multiple decentralized exchanges, aggregators, money markets, and the foundation of alternative DeFi tech stacks.

The cost is not only the passage of time on the calendar but also the ruling window needed for ETH to enter the bull market of 2021. By the time PoS was implemented, the debate between modularization and monolith had become a hot topic, and Ethereum was no longer in a dominant position.

Lack of Native Staking User Experience

PoS is central to the argument of "ETH as money." Issuing discipline. Native yield. Sound money.

Three years after the merger, the Ethereum Foundation still has not launched a first-party staking application suitable for ordinary users. The official way is to operate with command-line tools on a completely offline computer, stake at least 32 ETH, and also run and maintain a validator node yourself.

Users can only take a detour through Lido, and Lido's share remains around 25%. Vitalik himself has pointed out this centralization risk.

Every asset that wants to become a currency has default custodial and yield pathways. Bitcoin has Bitcoin Core. The US dollar has banks. Yet ETH’s most important monetary characteristics lack a standardized interface.

When an organization doesn't want to compete, it says, "We don't pick winners." This is a constructive failure hidden beneath all others.

A Managed Decline

The rollup-centric roadmap clearly weakens the base layer. EIP-4844 will go live on March 13, 2024. The blob base fee will remain at or near 1 wei for much of 2024 and 2025. Ethereum’s quarterly fee revenue has fallen by about 95% from the peak of $4.3 billion in Q4 2021.

Arbitrum’s own marketing blog states, "Arbitrum L2 occupies 90% to 98% of operational profit margins." By mid-2025, Base accounts for approximately 70% of all rollup profits. Every major L2 has issued its own tokens, causing severe fragmentation of capital flow within the Ethereum ecosystem.

This cannot be justified with architecture. From a revenue perspective, this is a strategic surrender. The timing of the basic asset being hollowed out is precisely when Solana proves that an integrated L1 can capture fees and accumulate value for its native token. Modularization may sound elegant on slides.

Ideology Over Product Delivery

This is an uncomfortable topic. The vocabulary of the Ethereum Foundation is filled with philosophical meanings: credible neutrality, public goods, second-order financing, diversity, regeneration, plural identities. Ethereum culture values philosophical correctness over product success.

Vitalik writes articles trying to distance this chain from financialization, while what the market was willing to buy at that time was precisely financialization.

Call it "wokeness" or "the capture of academia," it doesn't matter what you call it. The essence is the same. Every successful consumer tech company optimizes what users really want, rather than pursuing philosophical purity.

iPhone is closed. AWS is centralized. Uber breaks legal constraints. Stripe ignores established standards. They delivered what users didn't even realize they wanted, building a moat around themselves.

Solana organizes itself around one question: What do users want, and how do we deliver it together? The ecosystem coordinates with one another, products combine, and value returns to the base asset.

Ethereum, on the other hand, is organized around philosophical purity.

One side is focused on getting things done, while the other indulges in philosophical discussions.

When you stop competing, you call yourself a "noble giver."

A True Diagnosis

Dressing the current decline as a "decent cover" is self-deception. The true essence is the accumulated execution debt.

What hinders development is not a coordination issue, but a delivery issue. Ethereum had an absolute structural advantage in 2021 but spent its best three years on governance debates; meanwhile, Solana's ecosystem cooperated efficiently and priced the next L1 cycle without Ethereum's participation.

"ETH deserves its market cap limit" is true. This deserved limit is simply below the expectations of the bulls, and also below my own expectations. The reasons behind it are specific execution errors, not some coordination theory.

Selling off because "the logic has been fulfilled" is a dignified way to exit. The honest statement is: the sell-off is because Ethereum has given up fighting for asset appreciation.

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