Post

It explains why ETH hasn't risen now, but doesn't answer whether ETH is worth it in the future. Many people understand Ethereum as a company and then ask how much it earned this year. But I prefer to understand it as a set of financial infrastructure. The current issue is not that there is no value on-chain, but whether this part of the value actually flows back to ETH itself. For example. The increasing traffic on the highway every day does not necessarily mean the toll station earns more and more. If later most vehicles switch to free side roads and overpasses, the toll station's income will naturally decrease. L2 is somewhat like these side roads. A large number of transactions have been migrated to L2 because it is faster, has lower fees, and offers a better user experience. So today, many stablecoin transfers and DeFi interactions indeed cause the mainnet to consume less Gas than before. This is also where the market has been questioning ETH. The ecosystem is becoming more prosperous, but the value has not fully flowed back to ETH. However, I think we cannot only see this side. L2 does not exist independently. Whether it is Optimism, Arbitrum, or Base, they ultimately need to submit data to the Ethereum mainnet for final settlement, and their security also comes from ETH. So ETH is more like providing the security layer for the entire ecosystem, rather than being responsible for processing every single transaction. The real question then becomes: As the security layer of the entire ecosystem, how much value should ETH take? If in the future more and more value stays in L2, Rollup, and the application layer, and ETH can only collect a small "toll," then the market's current valuation of it may not be wrong. But if Ethereum continues to optimize the value capture mechanism in the future, allowing the development of the entire ecosystem to feedback more to ETH—for example, more ETH being burned, more ETH staked, more settlement demand returning to the mainnet—then the market's pricing of ETH today might be completely different. So the question I am thinking about now is no longer whether ETH has an ecosystem. Almost no one doubts this. What I really care about is: How much of the value created by the Ethereum ecosystem ultimately belongs to ETH. Because this is the core that truly determines ETH's long-term price. $ETH