Author: Joseph Chalom
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
The current drama surrounding the Ethereum Foundation (EF), and the noise about the ETH price, are missing the real big picture. I fully understand this debate, but it won't determine who leads the financial infrastructure for the next decade.
This is just the perspective of one stakeholder. Before leading Sharplink, I spent two decades as an executive at BlackRock, overseeing fintech business and digital asset strategy.
That experience taught me what institutions truly value before committing capital to a new set of infrastructure.
I want to step back, away from the noise, and offer a different assessment of Ethereum's current state and where it's headed.
The Ethereum Foundation Is Doing Its Job
Take a step back and look at the results delivered over the past decade. On the three attributes institutions care most about for adoption—trust, security, and liquidity—Ethereum is already qualified to win. It is winning, and by a large margin.
Look at the track record. The settlement of the majority of global stablecoin value occurs on Ethereum. Its scale of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) far exceeds any other blockchain, and it is also the default venue for high-value DeFi transactions.
No competing chain comes close on these dimensions.
This is not accidental; it is the result of years of rigorous protocol development by the Ethereum Foundation. Ethereum is the only blockchain with a decade-long record of major upgrades shipped at the base layer.
The Merge, EIP-1559, Dencun, Pectra, Fusaka—all delivered. The upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade will bring a step-change in scaling, and the Foundation is also pioneering the path to quantum resistance. This is the most ambitious technical roadmap in the industry.
Decentralization Is a Strength, Not a Flaw
Some of the fiercest criticisms of the Foundation treat decentralization as a weakness. This gets institutional logic completely backwards. The Ethereum ecosystem has the largest number of developers of any chain, and the vast majority of them do not work inside the Foundation.
No single foundation should control a chain. Institutions will not abandon their current systems just to lock themselves into another proprietary one.
They need confidence that the underlying properties they rely on cannot be arbitrarily changed by a few controllers. In fact, no chain should be dependent on any single actor.
Ethereum's credible neutrality and decentralization are precisely why it can become the settlement layer for future finance. These are not flaws.
Given the choice between a foundation focused on security, privacy, quantum resistance, and the core protocol, and one that exists only for short-term marketing, I would choose the former every single time.
Analogizing ETH's Value with Amazon
History is full of examples where foundational innovation was dismissed by critics, had its thunder stolen by flashier newcomers, only for the critics to be proven wrong later. Amazon is the clearest case study.
Early on, the market consensus on Amazon was that of an unprofitable online bookseller propped up by the dot-com bubble. Bears focused on the P&L, unable to see Bezos's long-term ambition.
He was building a fundamentally new market structure for online commerce. Its total addressable market wasn't books; it was the entire retail economy, later expanding to cloud computing and media. Analysts who focused solely on short-term price missed the bigger opportunity.
Today's Ethereum and ETH are in the same position. Its potential market is not crypto trading; it is the entire global financial system. ETH's intrinsic value is tightly bound to the network's expansion.
And this network stands on the cusp of a step-change in transaction volume, covering stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, DeFi, and the emerging wave of agent-driven finance.
To provide security for transaction volumes of that magnitude, ETH will become a highly demanded incentive layer, the ultimate bearer of trust, and its monetary premium will rise accordingly.
There is no Ethereum without ETH. The asset and the network are inseparable.
Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy, Be Greedy When Others Are Fearful
In almost every market cycle, the moment when retail capitulates and sentiment bottoms out is precisely the opportunity for disciplined capital to enter.
Warren Buffett built Berkshire by buying quality assets at the worst times in the market: from GEICO in the '70s to Bank of America and Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis.
For most of the past year, fear and greed indices have shown extreme fear in the market. The smartest investors buy quality assets during maximum panic. They act counter-cyclically, not pro-cyclically.
During the crypto winter following FTX, most institutions chose to avoid exposure to Bitcoin and ETH or shelved product launches. At BlackRock, we did the opposite.
We doubled down, investing in infrastructure, building ecosystem partnerships, and launching products that bridge TradFi with crypto. The lessons from Buffett and BlackRock are ones we should all learn.
Raising New Voices for Ethereum
The Ethereum Foundation is doing its job. Going forward, it will focus even more on CROPS—the core properties of Censorship Resistance, Capture Resistance, Openness, Privacy, and Security.
For most, the issue is clear: at a time when institutions are eager to embrace Ethereum, a leadership gap has emerged in the market promotion piece.
I have a strong feeling: stakeholders and participants within the ecosystem need to play a more significant role in Ethereum's narrative and its institutional adoption.
Since last summer, the Digital Asset Treasury Company and key Ethereum stewards have already played a major part in this effort.
This includes ecosystem participants like Sharplink, Tom Lee of BitMine, Joe Lubin of Consensys, Etherealize, Nethermind, Aave, Morpho, the EEA, and others. We also work closely with the small team within the Foundation focused on institutional education and adoption.
Sharplink is also investing in this ecosystem. We were among the first to stake billions in ETH, and have deployed hundreds of millions into quality DeFi protocols; we recently co-launched a $125 million DeFi yield fund with Galaxy Digital to support both existing and emerging protocols.
Even so, we can do more, and we will do more: become vocal advocates for Ethereum and actively support the coming supercycle of institutional adoption.
Ethereum's future is playing out now.
