Author:Reid
Translation:Jiahuan,ChainCatcher
When you don't want to blame the people who brought Ethereum to where it is today, you say "ETH got the market cap it deserved." But this cap didn't just happen; it's the result of specific people and specific dates, not some vague coordination theory.
A disclaimer before the accusations. As an early funding participant, I am still developing on Ethereum. I respect its vision and its liquidity.
I am also a disgruntled, bag-holding coin owner, and that's the whole point: this is an insider telling it straight, not a Solana cheerleader throwing rocks from the sidelines.
Retirement Before Securing Power
Sometime between 2021 and 2023, the narrative framework of the Ethereum Foundation shifted.
"We are building" became "We are infrastructure."
Vitalik's focus shifted from the Casper specification to essays on diversity, plural identity, and network states.
David Hoffman's portrayal of a "credibly neutral, generously giving, noble entity" is exactly the rhetoric a mature institution uses to justify ceding ground.
This is assuming the posture of an incumbent without having secured the position. In markets, your posture shapes outcomes. Acting like a winner before you've won is how challengers take your lunch.
Ethereum positioned itself as the retired chairman before it had won the chair, and the price chart accurately reflects that: ETH is down about 65% against BTC since the Merge.
The ESG Pitch Was a Signal
The core marketing of the Merge was a 99.95% reduction in energy consumption. Look at the Ethereum homepage. This choice reveals who the Ethereum Foundation is communicating with: they are speaking to their own conscience, not to the market. Institutions want yield. Developers want certainty. Users want cheaper transactions.
Pitching ESG instead of user experience signals that Ethereum is answering a question that capital is not asking.
For years, ESG critics and climate activists attacked PoW over carbon emissions. It never worked on Bitcoin because it's unfounded and, more importantly, the people allocating capital didn't care.
Ethereum spent its most significant narrative moment defending against a non-lethal attack instead of selling speed and yield. Meanwhile, Solana was selling speed.
A Seven-Year Gestation
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) was on the roadmap from Ethereum's launch in 2015. Vitalik was discussing slasher algorithms as early as the start of 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 DEXs, aggregators, money markets, and the foundations of an alternative DeFi tech stack.
The cost wasn't just calendar time, it was the window for dominance ETH needed entering the 2021 bull run. By the time PoS landed, the modular vs. monolithic debate was hot and Ethereum was no longer the default.
No 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 shipped a first-party staking application for normal users. The official route is: use command-line tools on a fully air-gapped machine, stake a minimum of 32 ETH, and run and maintain your own validator.
Users are forced to detour through Lido, whose share remains around 25%. Vitalik himself flagged this centralization risk.
Every asset that aspires to be money has a default custody and yield pathway. Bitcoin has Bitcoin Core. The Dollar has banks. The most important monetary property of ETH has no canonical interface.
When an organization doesn't want to compete, it says "we don't pick winners." This is the constructive failure underlying all the others.
A Managed Decline
The rollup-centric roadmap explicitly weakens the base layer. EIP-4844 went live on March 13, 2024. Blob base fees were at or near 1 wei for most of 2024 and 2025. Ethereum's quarterly fee revenue is down about 95% from the Q4 2021 peak of $4.3 billion.
Arbitrum's own marketing blog states: "Arbitrum L2s capture between 90% and 98% operating margins." As of mid-2025, Base captures ~70% of all rollup profit. Every major L2 has issued its own token, leading to massive capital flow fragmentation within the Ethereum ecosystem.
This can't be excused by architecture. It's strategic surrender from a revenue perspective. The base asset was hollowed out just as Solana proved an integrated L1 could capture fees and accrue value to its native token. Modular 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 valorizes philosophical correctness over product victory.
Vitalik writes essays trying to distance the chain from financialization at the exact moment the market is only willing to pay for financialization.
Call it "woke" or call it "academic capture," whatever. It's the same thing. Every successful consumer tech company optimizes for what users actually want, not for philosophical purity.
The iPhone was closed. AWS was centralized. Uber broke laws. Stripe ignored standards. They delivered what users didn't yet know they wanted and built moats.
Solana organized around a question: what do users want and how do we collectively deliver it? The ecosystem coordinates, products compose, value accrues to the base asset.
Ethereum organizes around philosophical purity.
One side is doing the work. The other side is doing the talk.
When you stop competing, you self-brand as a "noble giver."
The Real Diagnosis
Polishing the current stagnation into a "dignified tablecloth" is self-deception. The real story is accumulated execution debt.
The bottleneck is not coordination. It's delivery. Ethereum held every structural advantage in 2021 and spent the best three years of its life on governance debates; meanwhile, Solana as an ecosystem coordinated efficiently and priced in the next L1 cycle without Ethereum in the room.
"ETH got the market cap it deserved" is correct. That deserved cap is simply lower than bulls expected, and lower than I expected. The reason is specific execution errors, not coordination theory.
Selling because the thesis "has played out" is a dignified exit. The honest version is: selling because Ethereum has surrendered the fight for asset appreciation.
