State of Ethereum and ETH. From my POV. In 2021, ETH had a great cycle. NFTs. Gaming. Defi. The most interesting inventions were happening on Ethereum. However, while scalability was a bit better than 2018 when the network was famously clogged by @CryptoKitties, it was still a limiting factor. Gas wars began to hinder onboarding and drain users spending ability with miners benefitting the most from the high gas fees. Then a bunch of updates were shipped. ETH staking so holders rather than miners benefitted from fees. ETH burn via EIP 1559 to make ETH theoretically deflationary with enough activity (and it became deflationary for some time). This helped correct some of the underlying value accrual flaws. Next though, we had scalability adjustments (the Dencun upgrade mostly) and they worked! running an l2 became cheaper. It now became realistic to deploy a wider variety of apps on mainnet! However, a lot of these scalability adjustments also sacrificed ETH's value accrual mechanics as the consequence of scalability is lower fees. Good for users but at the expense of fee metrics. Fees dropped 99% after the Dencun upgrade. In this last cycle you had the rise of Bitmine and Sharplink. ETH holding companies with a concentrated position in ETH and who have the incentive to influence the network towards better value accrual for ETH. As well as orgs like @Etherealize_io pushing Wall Street's adoption of Ethereum. You also saw a lot of personnel volatility in the ETH foundation. The ETH foundation needs to balance: - security - scalability - decentralization the blockchain trilemma. However, due to the way the staking system works, ETH price is now a key aspect of security. If the TVL of ETH continues to grow, you eventually run into potential security issues if the value secured is much higher than the total value of all the ETH. Now, we have Bitmine and Sharplink beginning to fund spinoff entities of core contributors that understand the ETH value accrual trade-off that has been made as the network has gotten easier to use. EIPs like EIP 778, which introduced a minimum blob fee show the thought process is shifting towards an understanding that value accrual for ETH is important. I expect the debates and action around this to heat up as you have more examples like Robinhood chain where the fee value that these new L2s and builders contribute to ETH is likely underpriced. I also believe that these adjustments will be made slowly and the design space is as follows (but there's likely things that i'm missing) - increasing the gas limit on Mainnet - increasing the minimum blob fee or how blob fees are calculated - implementating a minimum base fee I've created a chart courtesy of @tokenterminal that shows the dynamics I've mentioned in this post: - scalability and usage has increased - TVL has increased - Fee revenue has dropped off a cliff I'm a buyer of ETH around 1400 if it gets there. I have enough for now.(Jihoz.ron)