2025, Ethereum: Life Through Death
By 2025, Ethereum faced an identity crisis, caught between Bitcoin's "digital gold" narrative and high-performance competitors like Solana. Regulatory clarity emerged with the U.S. CLARITY Act classifying ETH as a commodity, while the SEC’s "Project Crypto" acknowledged its decentralized nature, allowing staking rewards without securities classification.
The 2024 Dencun upgrade, intended to reduce L2 costs via EIP-4844, backfired—L2s thrived but paid minimal fees to L1, crashing Ethereum’s revenue and raising sustainability concerns. The December 2025 Fusaka upgrade addressed this with EIP-7918, tying Blob fees to L1 execution costs, ensuring L2s contribute fairly to L1 revenue. PeerDAS (EIP-7594) expanded data capacity, enabling scalable, low-cost transactions.
Ethereum’s new "B2B tax model" reframed its value: L2s handle high-volume, low-value transactions, while L1 provides security and settlement, capturing fees through ETH burns and staking rewards. Analysts projected an 8x increase in ETH burn rates by 2026.
Valuation models now combine DCF (discounted cash flow) for protocol revenue and "trustware" pricing for its role in securing high-value assets like RWA (real-world assets), where Ethereum dominates due to its security and decentralization. Despite Solana’s edge in consumer apps, Ethereum solidified its position as the foundation for institutional-grade DeFi and RWA, transitioning into a foundational economic layer for the digital economy.
marsbit12/24 01:27