Ethereum remains the largest blockchain ever built. It introduced programmable currency, anchored the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry, and is the primary venue for the world’s most secure smart contracts.
By legacy metrics, its dominance is unchallenged as it holds the deepest developer ecosystem, largest pool of locked capital, and plays a central role in the settlement of regulated stablecoins.
However, technological irrelevance rarely results in sudden collapse. It creeps in quietly, masked by metrics that describe where the market is rather than where it is going.
The phrase “we still have TVL” (Total Value Locked) has become a shorthand to describe this tension among Ethereum insiders. Although TVL has historically defined success, it increasingly measures assets posted as collateral rather than capital in motion.
The concern emerging now is that the ecosystem is relying on these legacy metrics while the real velocity of money is moving elsewhere. The central question for the industry now is whether this distinction will be important by 2030.
Data divergence
The “creepy” talk is back, but this time it’s driven by activity rather than market capitalization. The data paints a grim picture of the divergence.
According to Nansen, Ethereum’s annualized revenue fell about 76% year-over-year to around $604 million.
This drop follows the upgrade of the Dencun and Fusaka networks, which significantly reduced the fees paid by Layer 2 networks.
In contrast, Solana generated around $657 million during the same period, while TRON captured almost $601 million, almost entirely thanks to stablecoin velocity in emerging markets.
The divide is even starker when viewed through the prism of Artemis data, which captures user behavior rather than simple capital depth. In 2025, Solana processed approximately 98 million monthly active users and 34 billion transactions, surpassing Ethereum in almost every high-frequency category.
Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, notes that rejecting these indicators promotes dangerous complacency. He warned that Ethereum “needs to be paranoid” about unfavorable data, even if the TVL remains high.
The challenge, he says, is not just competition, but also the temptation to defend leadership using metrics that become less relevant as crypto’s core use cases evolve.
However, a critical examination requires nuance. While Artemis’ numbers show that Solana has won the “volume war”, Ethereum is fighting a different battle: the war for economic density.
A significant portion of Solana’s 34 billion transactions are arbitrage bots and consensus messages. This activity generates substantial volume but arguably offers lower economic value per byte than Ethereum’s higher-stakes settlement flows.
As a result, the market is effectively bifurcating, with Solana becoming the “NASDAQ” of high-speed execution, while Ethereum remains the “FedWire” of final settlement.
The emergency crisis
Yet labeling competition as “spam” risks missing a deeper cultural shift. The threat to Ethereum is not just that users are leaving, but that the urgency to retain them disappeared years ago.
Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, crystallized this sentiment in a reflection on his exit from the ecosystem.
He pointed out that his condemnation for ETH came to light at Devcon3 in Cancun in November 2017. He noted:
“ETH was the fastest asset in human history at the time, reaching a market cap of $100 billion. Gas fees were skyrocketing. It was clear that there was a need to scale as soon as possible. There was never any urgency.”
This observation that the platform lacked the “wartime” speed needed to capture mass adoption frames the current risk of “MySpace.” MySpace didn’t disappear because it lacked users; it lost its primacy as engagement shifted to platforms offering a smoother experience.
For Ethereum, this “seamless experience” was supposed to be provided by Layer 2 (L2) stacks like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
While this reduced costs, this “modular” roadmap created a fragmented user experience.
Additionally, as liquidity becomes distributed among disjoint accumulations and L2s pay much less “rent” to Ethereum for data storage, the direct economic link between user activity and the accumulation of ETH value has weakened.
The risk is that Ethereum remains the secure base layer, but the profit margins and brand loyalty accrue entirely to the L2s above it.
The pivot of accelerationism
In this context, the Ethereum Foundation has started to adjust its operational posture.
The long-standing focus on “ossification” of the protocol, that is, the idea that Ethereum should change as little as possible, has waned since the start of 2025 as development priorities have shifted toward faster iterations and performance improvements.
Significant leadership cemented this restructuring change. The appointment of Tomasz Stańczak, founder of client engineering company Nethermind, alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang as executive director, marked a shift towards engineering urgency.
The technical manifestation of this new leadership is the Pectra and Fusaka upgrade delivered this year.
At the same time, the “Beam Chain” roadmap, championed by EF researcher Justin Drake, proposes a massive overhaul of the consensus layer, targeting 4-second slot times and single-slot finality.
This suggests that Ethereum is finally trying to answer the scaling question on the core layer. The goal is to directly compete with the performance of integrated chains like Solana without sacrificing the decentralization that makes ETH a premier collateral asset.
It’s a high-stakes gamble trying to modernize a $400 billion in-flight network. However, executives appear to have calculated that the risk of execution failure is now lower than the risk of market stagnation.
The final verdict
The “we still have TVL” defense is a retrospective comfort blanket. In financial markets, liquidity is mercenary. He stays where he is best treated.
Ethereum’s bullish case remains credible, but it depends on its execution. If Beam Chain upgrades can be delivered quickly and the L2 ecosystem can resolve its fragmentation issues to present a unified front, Ethereum can solidify its position as the global settlement layer.
However, if usage continues to grow on high-speed chains as Ethereum relies solely on its role as a collateral repository, it faces a future where it will be systemically important but commercially secondary.
By 2030, the market will likely care less about the “story” of smart contracts and more about invisible, fluid infrastructure.
Thus, the coming years will test whether Ethereum can remain the default choice for this infrastructure, or simply a specialized component of it.
