Why Ethereum Is Unlikely to Reach a New ATH in the Next 2 Years

It’s a painful truth for many crypto folks — holding ETH bought at $2,000–$4,000 with dreams of seeing $10,000 per coin. That price target was never grounded in fundamentals — it was inflated by influencer hype during the era of an overloaded Ethereum mainnet and the early rise of L2s.

Looking back, it’s clear: Ethereum hit its all-time high ($4,878 in November 2021) during peak on-chain activity. It was the NFT boom, DeFi 2.0 hype, and massive gas wars. People were burning ETH left and right just to mint, farm, or participate in protocols. Transactions often cost $50–$200, and whales were buying ETH in bulk just to operate their farms.

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Bottom line:
Until on-chain activity returns to the Ethereum mainnet, and until there’s a strong new demand driver for ETH itself (not just its infrastructure), talk of $5,000–$10,000 ETH is more hope than strategy. Over the next two years, ETH is likely to remain in a consolidation range between $2,000 and $3,500 while louder narratives take center stage in crypto.

On top of that, Ethereum is no longer the only "smart contract chain" in town. Solana, Sui, Aptos, Celestia, and experimental L2s like Monad or EigenDA-based chains are pulling attention, developers, and liquidity away from Ethereum. Capital is getting fragmented.

Add to that the broader macroeconomic environment: high interest rates, cautious institutional money, unclear regulation in the U.S., and the absence of new mass-adoption narratives like NFTs or GameFi. All of this makes it very unlikely that ETH will reach a new ATH any time soon.

Explore the EIPs / ERCs mentioned in this cast:

Today? Everything’s changed.

The NFT hype has cooled off, and most of the activity has moved to Layer 2 networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, zkSync, and others. These rollups make transactions dirt cheap and lightning fast. Each new L2 aims to be even more efficient than the last, often subsidizing gas fees or making them completely free.

As a result, the actual utility of ETH as gas has declined significantly. Users no longer need to hold large amounts of ETH to interact with dApps — a few bucks on L2 is more than enough. Even the burn mechanism introduced with EIP-1559 isn’t generating the same deflationary pressure anymore because gas usage is down.