Author:Reid
Translation:Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
When you don't want to blame the people who made Ethereum what it is today, you say, "ETH has earned its market cap." But this cap is the result of specific people and specific dates, not some vague coordination theory.
A disclaimer before the indictment. As an early-stage financing participant, I still develop on Ethereum. I respect its vision and liquidity.
At the same time, I am also a dissatisfied bag holder, and that's the point: This is an insider telling the truth, not a Solana shill throwing stones from the outside.
Retiring Before Securing Power
Sometime between 2021 and 2023, the Ethereum Foundation's discourse shifted.
"We are building" became "We are infrastructure."
Vitalik's focus shifted from the Casper specification to articles about pluralism, plural identities, and network states.
David Hoffman's narrative of a "credibly neutral, generous, and noble image" is precisely the rhetoric mature institutions use to justify giving up ground.
This is adopting the demeanor of an incumbent before securing the seat. In the market, your posture creates outcomes. Acting like a winner before winning is precisely why challengers take your place.
Ethereum, without winning the chairmanship, first considered itself the retired chairman, and the price chart accurately reflects this: ETH has fallen about 65% against BTC since the Merge.
Environmental Advocacy as a Signal
The marketing core of the Merge was a 99.95% reduction in energy consumption. Look at Ethereum's official website. This choice reveals the Ethereum Foundation's target audience: they are preaching to their own conscience, not to the market. Institutions want yield. Developers want certainty. Users want cheaper transactions.
Not selling the user experience but selling ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) indicates that Ethereum is answering questions the capital side is not even asking.
For years, ESG critics and climate activists have used the carbon emission issue to attack PoW. This attack had no effect on Bitcoin because it held no water, and more importantly, those allocating capital simply didn't care.
Ethereum spent its most significant narrative moment defending against an ineffective attack instead of selling speed and yield. Meanwhile, Solana was selling speed.
Seven Years of Difficult Birth
Proof of Stake (PoS) has been on the roadmap since Ethereum's launch in 2015. Vitalik was discussing slasher algorithms as early as early 2014. The Merge didn't land until September 15, 2022. Seven years from launch, spanning two full crypto cycles.
Solana launched its Mainnet Beta in March 2020. While Ethereum spent its biggest narrative window delivering PoS, Solana delivered wallets, multiple decentralized exchanges, aggregators, money markets, and the foundation of an alternative DeFi tech stack.
The cost wasn't just the passage of time on the calendar, but the window of dominance ETH needed entering the 2021 bull market. By the time PoS landed, the modular vs. monolithic debate was hot, and Ethereum was no longer dominant.
Lack of Native Staking UX
PoS is central to the "ETH as Money" thesis. Issuance discipline. Native yield. Sound money.
Three years after the Merge, the Ethereum Foundation still has not launched a first-party staking application suitable for average users. The official route is: operate with command-line tools on a fully air-gapped computer, stake at least 32 ETH, and run and maintain a validator node yourself.
Users are forced to take a detour via Lido, whose share remains around 25%. Vitalik himself has pointed out this centralization risk.
Every asset that wants to become money has a default route for custody and yield. Bitcoin has Bitcoin Core. The dollar has banks. Yet ETH's most important monetary feature lacks a canonical interface.
When an organization doesn't want to compete, it says, "We don't pick winners." This is the constructive failure underlying all other failures.
A Managed Decline
The rollup-centric roadmap explicitly weakens the base layer. EIP-4844 went live on March 13, 2024. The blob base fee was at or near 1 wei for most of 2024 and 2025. Ethereum's quarterly fee revenue has fallen by about 95% from its Q4 2021 peak of $4.3 billion.
Arbitrum's own marketing blog writes: "Arbitrum L2s capture 90% to 98% operating margins." By mid-2025, Base captured roughly 70% of all rollup profits. Every major L2 has issued its own token, causing capital flows within the Ethereum ecosystem to be severely fragmented.
This can't be excused by architecture. From a revenue perspective, this is strategic surrender. The timing of hollowing out the base asset coincides with Solana demonstrating that an integrated L1 can capture fees and accumulate value for its native token. Modularity sounds elegant on slides.
Ideology Over Product Delivery
This is an uncomfortable topic. The Ethereum Foundation's vocabulary is philosophical: credible neutrality, public goods, quadratic funding, pluralism, regen, plural identity. Ethereum culture values philosophical correctness over product victory.
Vitalik writes articles trying to distance the chain from financialization, at a time when the market was only willing to pay for financialization.
Call it "wokeness," call it "academic capture," call it whatever. The essence is the same. Every successful consumer tech company optimizes for what users actually want, not for philosophical purity.
The iPhone is closed. AWS is centralized. Uber broke the law. Stripe ignored established standards. They delivered what users didn't even know they wanted and built moats.
Solana organizes around a question: What do users want, and how do we deliver it together? The ecosystem coordinates, products compose, and value returns to the base asset.
Ethereum organizes around philosophical purity.
One side gets things done, the other side talks philosophy.
When you stop competing, you call yourself a "noble giver."
A Real Diagnosis
Polishing the current malaise as a "decent cover" is self-deception. The real essence is cumulative execution debt.
The hindrance isn't a coordination problem. It's a delivery problem. Ethereum had absolute structural dominance in 2021 and spent its best three years in governance debates; meanwhile, Solana, as an ecosystem, coordinated efficiently and priced the next L1 cycle without Ethereum.
"ETH has earned its market cap" is correct. This earned cap is just lower than what bulls expected, and lower than what I myself expected. The reason is specific execution failures, not some coordination theory.
Selling because the logic is "already priced in" is a decent way to exit. The truly honest statement is: selling because Ethereum has given up the fight for asset appreciation.
