Author: Joseph Chalom
Translation: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
The current drama surrounding the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and the debate over the price of ETH are missing the bigger picture. I fully understand this debate, but it does not determine who will lead the financial infrastructure for the next decade.
This is the perspective of just one stakeholder. Before leading Sharplink, I spent two decades as a senior executive at BlackRock, responsible for fintech business and digital asset strategy.
That experience taught me what institutions genuinely value before committing capital to a new set of infrastructure.
I want to step back, avoid the noise, and offer a different assessment of where Ethereum is today and where it's headed.
The Ethereum Foundation is Doing Its Job
Take a step back and look at the outcomes delivered over the past decade. On the three attributes most critical for institutional adoption—trust, security, and liquidity—Ethereum has secured a winning hand. It is winning, and by a significant margin.
Look at the track record. The settlement of most stablecoin value globally occurs on Ethereum. Its scale of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) far exceeds any other blockchain, and it remains the default venue for high-value DeFi transactions.
No competing chain comes close on these dimensions.
This is no accident; it's the result of the Ethereum Foundation's years of rigorous protocol development. Ethereum is the only blockchain with a ten-year record of major upgrades at its base layer.
The Merge, EIP-1559, Dencun, Pectra, Fusaka—the journey continues. The upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade will bring step-function scaling, and the Foundation is leading the path toward post-quantum security. This is the most ambitious technical roadmap in the industry.
Decentralization is a Feature, Not a Bug
Some of the fiercest criticism against the Foundation frames decentralization as a weakness. This gets the institutional logic precisely backwards. The Ethereum ecosystem has the largest developer community of any chain, and the vast majority of those developers 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 setup.
They need confidence that the foundational properties they rely on cannot be arbitrarily altered by a small group of controllers. In fact, no chain should rely on any single participant.
Ethereum's credible neutrality and decentralization are precisely why it can serve as the future settlement layer for finance. These are not bugs.
If I had to choose between a foundation focused on security, privacy, post-quantum readiness, and core protocol, versus one that just services short-term marketing, I'd pick the former every single time.
Analogizing ETH's Value Using Amazon
History is full of examples where foundational innovation is dismissed by naysayers, overshadowed by flashier newcomers, only for the naysayers to be proven completely wrong. Amazon offers the clearest case study.
Early on, the market consensus on Amazon was: an unprofitable online bookseller propped up by the dot-com bubble. Bears fixated on the P&L, missing Bezos's long-term ambition.
He was building an entirely new online commercial market structure. Its total addressable market wasn't books; it was the entire retail economy, later expanding to cloud computing and media. Analysts focused on short-term prices missed the larger opportunity.
Ethereum and ETH today are in the same position. Its total addressable market is not crypto trading; it's the entire global financial system. ETH's intrinsic value is tied directly to the network's expansion.
And that network stands on the precipice of a step-change in transaction volume, spanning stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, DeFi, and the emerging wave of agentic finance.
To secure such enormous transaction volume, ETH will become the essential incentive layer, the ultimate bearer instrument of trust, and its monetary premium will rise accordingly.
No ETH, no Ethereum. The asset and the network are inseparable.
Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy
In almost every market cycle, the moment when retail capitulates and sentiment hits rock bottom is precisely when disciplined capital has the opportunity to enter.
Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway by buying quality assets at the market's worst moments: from GEICO in the 1970s to Bank of America and Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis.
For much of the past year, the Fear & Greed Index has shown extreme fear. The smartest investors buy quality assets during maximum fear. They act counter-cyclically, not in tandem with the crowd.
During the crypto winter post-FTX, most institutions chose to avoid Bitcoin and ETH exposure, or shelved product launches. At BlackRock, we did the opposite.
We doubled down, investing in infrastructure, building ecosystem partnerships, and launching products to connect TradFi with crypto. There's a lesson from both Buffett and BlackRock that we should all heed.
Raising New Voices for Ethereum
The Ethereum Foundation is doing its job. Moving forward, it will focus even more on the CROPS properties—Censorship-Resistance, Capture-Resistance, Open-Source, Privacy, Security.
For most, the question is clear: at a time when institutions are eager to embrace Ethereum, there is a leadership gap in the go-to-market effort.
I have a strong belief: stakeholders and participants within the ecosystem need to play a more prominent role in Ethereum's narrative and institutional adoption.
Since last summer, Digital Asset Treasury companies and core Ethereum stewards have already played a crucial part in this effort.
This includes ecosystem participants like Sharplink, Tom Lee of BitMine, Joe Lubin of Consensys, Etherealize, Nethermind, Aave, Morpho, EEA, and others. We also collaborate closely with the small team inside the Foundation focused on institutional education and adoption.
Sharplink itself is investing in this ecosystem. We were among the first to stake billions in ETH, deployed hundreds of millions into quality DeFi protocols, and recently co-launched a $125 million DeFi yield fund with Galaxy Digital to support existing and emerging protocols.
Even so, we can do more, and we will: be outspoken advocates for Ethereum, actively supporting the impending supercycle of institutional adoption.
Ethereum's future is unfolding now.
