Author: Reid
Compiled by: Jia Huan, ChainCatcher
When you don't want to blame the people who made Ethereum what it is today, you might say, "ETH got its deserved market cap." But the reason this cap is the way it is now is because of specific individuals and specific dates, not some vague coordination theory.
Before making any accusations, let me state something. As an early investor, I am still developing on Ethereum. I respect its vision and liquidity.
At the same time, I am also a disgruntled holder of the trapped tokens, and that's the key point: this is an insider telling the truth, not a Solana promoter throwing stones from the sidelines.
Retire in glory before assuming power
Sometime between 2021 and 2023, the Ethereum Foundation's discourse shifted.
"We are building" has become "We are infrastructure".
Vitalik shifted his focus from the Casper specification to articles about diversity, multiple identities, and the cyber nation.
The "credible, neutral, and generous image" described by David Hoffman is precisely the rhetoric mature institutions use to defend themselves when giving up ground.
This is putting on airs of someone in power before even securing their position. In the market, your posture determines your outcome. Acting like a winner before you've even won is exactly why challengers steal your job.
Ethereum hasn't even won the chairmanship yet, but it's already acting like a retired chairman, and the price chart accurately reflects this: since the merger, the price of ETH against BTC has fallen by about 65%.
Environmental protection publicity is a signal
The core of the merger's marketing message is a 99.95% reduction in energy consumption. Just look at the Ethereum website. This choice exposes who the Ethereum Foundation is communicating with: they're appealing to their own conscience, not the market. Institutions want profits. Developers want certainty. Users want cheaper transactions.
By focusing on ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) rather than user experience, Ethereum demonstrates that it is answering questions that investors have not even raised.
For years, ESG critics and climate activists have used the issue of carbon emissions to attack Proof-of-Work (PoW). This attack is ineffective against Bitcoin because it is untenable, and more importantly, those allocating the capital simply don't care.
Ethereum spent its most important narrative moment defending against a harmless attack instead of promoting speed and benefits. Meanwhile, Solana was promoting speed.
Seven years of difficult childbirth
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) has been on Ethereum's roadmap since its launch in 2015. Vitalik Buterin was already discussing the slasher algorithm as early as the beginning of 2014. The merger wasn't finalized until September 15, 2022. Seven years from its release, it has gone through two complete crypto cycles.
Solana launched its mainnet beta in March 2020. While Ethereum was expending its largest narrative window to deliver PoS, Solana delivered wallets, multiple decentralized exchanges, aggregators, money markets, and the foundation for an alternative DeFi technology stack.
The cost wasn't just the passage of time on the calendar, but also the window of dominance ETH needed to enter the 2021 bull market. By the time PoS was implemented, the debate between modularity and monolithic architecture had become a hot topic, and Ethereum was no longer dominant.
Lack of native staking user experience
PoS is central to the argument for "ETH as money." Issuance discipline. Native yields. Sound money.
Three years after the merger, the Ethereum Foundation still hasn't launched a first-party staking application suitable for ordinary users. The official approach is to use a command-line tool on a completely offline computer, stake at least 32 ETH, and run and maintain a validator node yourself.
Users can only bypass Lido, and Lido's share remains around 25%. Vitalik himself has also pointed out this risk of centralization.
Every asset aspiring to become currency has a default custody and yield mechanism. Bitcoin has Bitcoin Core. The US dollar has banks. But Ethereum's most crucial monetary characteristic lacks a standardized interface.
When an organization doesn't want to compete, it says, "We don't pick winners." This is a constructive failure hidden beneath all other failures.
A managed recession
The rollup-centric roadmap explicitly weakens the base layer. EIP-4844 went live on March 13, 2024. Blob base fees remained at or near 1 wei for most of 2024 and 2025. Ethereum's quarterly fee revenue declined by approximately 95% from its peak of $4.3 billion in Q4 2021.
Arbitrum's own marketing blog states, "Arbitrum L2 accounts for 90% to 98% of operating profit margins." As of mid-2025, Base accounted for approximately 70% of all rollup profits. Each major L2 has issued its own token, resulting in severe fragmentation of capital flows within the Ethereum ecosystem.
This cannot be justified in terms of architecture. From a revenue perspective, it's a strategic surrender. The timing of the underlying asset being drained coincides with Solana's demonstration that integrated L1 can capture fees and accumulate value for its native token. Modularity certainly sounds elegant in the slides.
Ideology outweighs product delivery
This is an uncomfortable topic. The Ethereum Foundation's vocabulary is full of philosophical implications: trust neutrality, public goods, quadratic funding, diversity, regen, and multiple identities. The Ethereum culture values philosophical correctness more than product victory.
Vitalik wrote an article attempting to distance the blockchain from financialization, but at the time, the only thing the market was willing to pay for was precisely financialization.
Call it an "awakening," call it an "academic capture," call it whatever you want. The essence is the same. Every successful consumer technology company optimizes what users truly want, rather than pursuing philosophical purity.
The iPhone is closed. AWS is centralized. Uber broke legal restrictions. Stripe ignored established standards. They delivered what users didn't even realize they wanted, and built a moat around it.
Solana is organized around one question: What do users want, and how do we deliver it together? The ecosystem coordinates with each other, products are combined, and value returns to the underlying assets.
Ethereum, on the other hand, is organized around the concept of philosophical purity.
On one hand, people are focused on their work, while on the other hand, they are indulging in empty philosophical discussions.
When you stop competing, you call yourself a "noble giver".
Real diagnosis
To try to disguise the current downturn as a "decent cover-up" is self-deception. The real issue is the accumulation of debt.
The obstacle to development is not coordination, but delivery. Ethereum had an absolute structural advantage in 2021, yet spent its best three years on governance debates; meanwhile, Solana, as an ecosystem, collaborated efficiently and completed the pricing of the next L1 cycle without Ethereum's involvement.
It's correct that "ETH has reached its deserved market cap." This deserved cap is simply lower than the bulls' expectations, and also lower than my own. The reason behind this is specific execution errors, not some coordination theory.
Selling because the logic has "been realized" is a dignified way to exit. The truly honest statement is: the sell-off is because Ethereum has given up fighting for asset appreciation.
