Jake
@jake0
A couple of colleagues and I just published a 13-page report on Ethereum's future. Here are some key points and charts: - Ethereum’s future has never been more in question. The rollup-centric roadmap scaled Ethereum but incentivized protocols like Uniswap to launch their own L2s, causing ETH fee revenue to plummet. - The Ultrasound Money narrative has stalled. EIP-4844 cut L2 costs by increasing blobs, but further reduced fees paid by L2s to Ethereum. ETH supply has retraced the year of deflation that followed the Merge. - All isn’t lost. Ethereum leads in key metrics like TVL and stablecoin market cap. A leading 2025 narrative, the tokenization of RWAs, is primarily occurring on Ethereum. - The ship is turning. The community has raised concerns over L2 prioritization, and the results are showing. New @ethereumfndn leadership is serious about scaling the L1, improving UX, and continuing to scale blobs. __ The full report can be found here: https://messari.io/report/ethereums-future-post-pectra
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Jake
@jake0
@matthewb thoughts?
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matthewb
@matthewb
great work, though don't have an enterprise sub atm so can't see the whole thing. a few thoughts: - if you were charting ethereum protocol revenue like a token, you would never buy that chart. looks ugly. - totally agree re: the rollup-centric roadmap, basically boils down to a lack of alignment between L2s and ethereum. running a popular L2 sequencer is quite profitable, so the incentive is strong for popular apps to own their stack and deploy their own chain. - another big question on the horizon is how monad and megaeth will eat into ethereum's market share as they compete alongside solana and other high throughput chains. we spoke previously about charting ETH/USD vs. avg gas, previously I believed that there was a plausible correlation between the two. looking at 2024 heading into 2025, I believe this is becoming less and less the case. haven't looked closely but you could argue that ETH's price action is becoming less correlated to its protocol revenue.
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matthewb
@matthewb
last thing I would say is that if I was going to hold stables on any chain with size, it would be on mainnet. I don't believe yields elsewhere can justify the R/R vs. blue chip defi protocols on mainnet. so, I think there is a valid argument for ethereum to remain dominant in this respect, which likely extends to institutional adoption (whether RWAs or otherwise). again, whether this activity accrues value to ETH the asset is another question. I think the main catalyst ahead is staking being added to the ETH ETFs, which seems likely given the guidance recently released by the SEC (see here: https://x.com/RebeccaRettig1/status/1928225715595427967). Aside from this, I think recent price action has been strong and ETH looks good on medium and higher timeframes. as the pendulum swings back from memes in 2023-24, ethereum's institutional adoption narrative—whether RWAs, company treasuries, or ETF inflows—seems well-positioned to me.
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Jake
@jake0
Great point about Monad and MegaETH. Honestly bc they are so hyper I think they will steal a good amount of market share (in the short term), but probably not be able to compete w/ Arbitrum & Base (in the medium-long term). Ethereum needs more unification, like the Open Intents Framework rather than more disparate L2s/EVM chains like Monad and MegaETH. Although the first half of our report is quite bearish (since Ethereum/ETH has been dormant the past few years), we do make a strong argument for Ethereum, ETH, and the Ethereum Foundation successfully pulling off a unification/scaling effort.
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@boogers.eth
how does bitcoin protocol revenues look as comparison?
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