Transcription
In 2025, Ethereum sits at a crossroads. Once the undisputed king of smart contracts, it's facing undeniable challenges on multiple fronts. Vitalik is a great guy, don't get me wrong. He's changed the entire world and uh we owe everything to him. But we need to hold people accountable because it's much larger than an individual now. This is a community. It's a movement.
Ether's price stagnated for too long. Competition from faster, cheaper layer 1 blockchains has accelerated and its dependence on layer 2s has created misaligned incentives. For the first time in a decade, people are asking, "Can Ethereum reinvent itself?"
"That position of Ethereum as an L1 got little bit threatened by alt L1s as we call them."
"I would find a way to make it cheaper to build on Ethereum. More scalability, but I will definitely pick Ethereum over Solana."
Cointelegraph traveled to ETHC in CAN to find out how the Ethereum Foundation is trying to steady the ship.
"We are focusing on the on the future. So, the last 6 months, obviously, the beginning of the year a bit bumpy with a lot of criticism, but I think the changes were already happening," but longtime developers are piling pressure on the foundation to be more active, accountable, and transparent with the community. How do they justify that? A lot of those decisions are being made behind closed doors in a black box in a very opaque manner and it's kind of putting core developers out on their ass and driving really, really great talent out of this space and it's bleeding into Solana.
Ethereum's founders have long avoided talking about the price of its native token ETH. But as staking became the security backbone of the network, price became existential. "We shouldn't be afraid to say the P word. It's not vulgar at all. Like, excuse my French, but I like when the price go up because it's good for the security of Ethereum."
"Can the ethos of autonomy and decentralization revive Ethereum? We're about to tell you the whole story."
[Music]
In July 2025, Ethereum celebrated its 10th birthday. A decade ago, the network went live, introducing programmability and composability to a technological innovation pioneered by the advent of Bitcoin in 2009. Following Ethereum's shift to proof-of-stake consensus, called the Merge, in 2022, the network now heavily leans on layer 2s to handle transactions and decentralized applications. This brought scale, speed, and cost reductions to the layer 1, but introduced a variety of complications.
Cointelegraph spoke to Tomas Stansac, who was appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation in April 2025. Stansac said the rise of Solana and next-generation blockchains like Sui and Aptos had spurred the EF into action through 2024, even if the community wasn't aware of this sense of urgency.
"We are focusing on the on the future. Um, so the last six months, obviously, the beginning of the year a bit bumpy with a lot of criticism, but I think the changes were already happening. It's just sometimes you have like social media criticizing something that's that's already moving in the right direction."
The EF is actively talking to builders in its competing blockchain ecosystems. Stansac said he's invited the founders of different protocols to exchange ideas and is actively encouraging Ethereum ecosystem builders to look outside for inspiration and technological innovations.
"We want to learn. Researchers, I think naturally look at all the different solutions. So they do have to think of like what different consensus uh designs are there, uh what are the innovations in the P2P space and it matters on the like thinking on it about Ethereum from the business development side, the growth partnerships, uh convincing everyone in the ecosystem to be very well aware of what is being built."
According to Sep Nailwell, who co-founded prominent Ethereum layer 2 Polygon, the rise of Solana and L1 alternatives had slowly impacted the perception and dominance of Ethereum as the go-to smart contract blockchain.
"Ethereum is still the L1 or the smart contract L1 where people want to build applications. But what happened is that that position of Ethereum as an L1 got little bit threatened by, you know, other uh, you know, alt L1s as we as we call them. Ethereum's, you know, valuation took a nose dive and that started percolating into like, there is some problem with the L2 ecosystem also."
Meanwhile, Polygon Lab CEO Mark Beron highlighted a potential risk of Ethereum trying to directly compete with some of the performance metrics of its competitors, which are far more focused on execution than settlement and security.
"And I've often said, like, Ethereum was in a privileged position of having launched much before others and having built network effects before others built any. And that gives you a lot of room to be able to build in a slower, more deliberate way. But I think when you do that, you give room to competitors to potentially come up, which is what's happened. I think it is dangerous, right? If they go down this road of trying to compete on execution too heavily, likelihood is they will end up getting out competed by those who are trying to do the exact same thing. And that means that Ethereum is trying to compete with them head-to-head on that front. And that's not something that Ethereum's like, well equipped to do."
The price of ETH is the elephant in the room that many have avoided talking about for years, but it matters for a lot of different reasons. Since Ethereum's shift to proof-of-stake consensus, called the Merge, in 2022, ETH holders stake their tokens to secure the network and earn a yield, like interest earned on a savings account at a conventional bank. This also means that the value of ETH is integral to the security of Ethereum. The lower its price drops, the cheaper it would be for a malicious actor to attack the network.
Discontent with the impact of the Ethereum Foundation, developers and community members, led by Zack Cole, announced the formation of the Ethereum Community Foundation at ECC.
"For a really long time, everybody talks about everything other than the price of ETH, but the price of ETH is directly correlated to the security of the network. It funds validators that help secure that and scale it. I believe that the Ethereum Foundation has a fiduciary duty to serve ETH holders and they have been neglected for a really long time."
Ethereum France President Jerome Datishi, the man behind ETHC, echoed Cole's sentiments. ETH price shouldn't be a taboo topic.
"We shouldn't be afraid to say the P word. Uh, it's not uh, it's not vulgar at all. Like, excuse my French, but I like when the price go up because it's good for the security of of Ethereum and it's also good since we are not in our infancy anymore. Since the Merge, we are in a proof-of-stake setup, which means that the price performance is very important for the image that we give to the potential buyers and the potential uh newcomers to the ecosystem."
Sundep Nailwell doesn't believe that Ethereum is facing any significant existential risks despite the lackluster price performance of ETH over the past 3 years.
"It doesn't really matter what's the price of uh Ethereum unless it starts becoming a security issue on the proof of stake layer and I think like, you know, we are far, far away from that, like where it starts becoming any sorts of problem. But that's the harsh reality of this of of the crypto industry, the price starts mattering a lot because if the price is not doing well, even if the tech is doing well, the devs will feel start feeling bearish about it."
The point at which ETH's value becomes a risk to the network security is not so clear-cut. On-chain analyst Hilderbert Muay and Polygon Lab CEO Mark Buyeron highlight the intricacies in determining ETH's value.
"Do I think the price of Ethereum matters? I do think it does, given that the core, the security of network is dependent on it. Now, it's hard to to to actually calculate, you know, how much does it need to be relative to how much is settled on the blockchain as well. But I do think, um, you know, Ethereum progressing is uh, in does need to be in tandem with the Ethereum price also growing. And so when it comes to focusing on the value, the question is like, how do you focus on that value? Should Ethereum be focused on like institutional adoption of ETH in terms of like directly holding it, ETFs, staking ETFs, like treasury companies. Yeah. Like 100%. Ethereum should be focused on trying to make that happen, including the Ethereum Foundation in whatever way it wants to play a role."
The approval of Ethereum exchange-traded funds in July 2024 signaled the arrival of institutional interest and investment in Ethereum. MU's Ethereum ETF dashboards on June paint a telling picture. Wall Street firms' on-chain holdings are worth more than $18 billion midway through 2025.
"I think primarily, like historically, and I understand that there has been some hesitation to discuss the price of ETH just due to different regulatory challenges. But now is the greatest time in the history of crypto to be out there experimenting. Wall Street is piling in and traditional finance is very interested in in everything that we're doing, 'cause this is the future of finance."
Over the past year, many have questioned whether the EF kept up with the times. The community brought receipts. A transfer of 35,000 ETH to Kraken in early 2025 sparked concerns about dumping ETH to fund operations. Critics lamented a lack of urgency to address scalability issues and validator incentives. Conflicts of interest complicated matters further. EF researchers Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist eventually resigned after controversially accepting advisory roles at EigenLayer, a pioneering restaking protocol. Vitalik eventually took charge. Stansac and Hyawei Wang were appointed as executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation, reporting to a board led by Vitalik. The EF introduced an 18-month treasury policy to manage its $970 million reserves. No more out-of-the-blue ETH sales by the foundation. It also began staking ETH and deploying assets, including depositing 45,000 ETH to Aave and Compound to generate sustainable revenues. This DeFi punk approach prioritized supporting privacy-focused, permissionless DeFi protocols. But did the Ethereum Foundation move fast enough?
"I don't want to come across as being um, you know, egregious or aggressive towards the EF. It's not about that. I have a fear that it's too little too late. What I'm afraid of is that these are just more sock puppets uh to enact the will of Vitalik."
With the blessing of ECC's founder, Cole took to the stage to announce the launch of the Ethereum Community Foundation.
"So the Ethereum Community Foundation is more of a grassroots initiative to kind of uh pick up the slack where the EF has failed to deliver. I think that uh we're really acting as a forcing function. I don't want to be doing this and I shouldn't be on stage. I'm not qualified, right? I'm an engineer. I've been doing this for a really long time. I've been building products and I've been shipping protocols. But um uh ideally, what we're doing is kind of applying pressure to the Ethereum Foundation to act in the best interest of its fiduciaries and to take a different approach. We are here to welcome anybody that is willing to wave the flag or uh that is willing to contribute or share with Ethereum. Uh our ecosystem has grown since 2015 with being welcoming and that means also that dissident descendant voices in our ecosystem and your core ecosystem should be heard as well. This is what competition, competition brings to you. Like due to that competition, like, you know, which previously in the Ethereum foundation, the things were slow and, you know, the organization was not that, you know, kind of like probably uh, you know, that that well-functioning, which happens when you don't have any competition."
Constructive criticism has long been held as a healthy driver of growth. For the Ethereum Foundation, this has been a major catalyst for change and largely inevitable. According to June Analytics co-founder Frederick Hoger, Figment co-founder Laurian Gable, and Basis's product lead Tom Vieiraa.
"I think it's been uh healthy and productive to have that critique and conversation and scrutiny. I I do think Ethereum has had like a clear first-mover advantage, but I also think it's important to not be complacent and take your position for granted. And it definitely did feel like the Ethereum foundation and sort of core community, if you will, maybe were a little too research-oriented and not enough about, okay, how do we actually get this into the real world and into users and businesses hands? There are lots of Lindy effects for Ethereum. It's been around a long time. It has the usage. Um, but yeah, I think in any organization, um, a change of leadership happens at certain points. Some people are good from 0 to 1. Some people are good from 1 to 5. Some people are good from 1 to 10. And I think a majority of the community probably felt like there was time for a change in um um a different direction. And I think that's happened. And I think it's like how it should happen. Thinking about the past year, I think some great conversations have happened, some great clarity has come to how the EF is running things. You know, these three pillars of protocol research around scaling the L2, scaling L1, and improving the UX is really compelling."
In 2025, the Ethereum ecosystem began to shift. New leadership, more transparency, and a renewed focus on layer 1 performance. Pectra, Ethereum's latest network upgrade, hit the main net in May 2025. It was the most significant change to the protocol since the Merge in 2022. Combining the Prague execution layer and Electra consensus layer hard forks, Pectra introduced 11 Ethereum improvement proposals aimed at improving scalability, user experience, and staking efficiency. Pectra builds improvements made by the 2024 Deneb upgrade, which famously introduced blobs through EIP-4844, known as proto-danksharding. Blobs provided a new way for L2s to post transaction data on the L1. The impact was dramatic. L2 transaction fees dropped by more than 90%. An unavoidable consequence of this upgrade was that L2s no longer paid huge fees to settle on Ethereum, a technological boon but an economic drawback for L1 validators.
"On these metrics, we've seen, for instance, on the L2 uh situation. It's interesting because now 85% of transactions are on L2s. So there's only 15% or left on Ethereum L1, but 85% of the volume still lives on L1. So the L1 has very limited sort of engagement, if you will, in in just like the absolute number, but the the big money is still clearly on L1. And then obviously, the L2s used to pay a lot to settle to L1, and since the blobs were introduced in March uh 2024, that has basically gone to zero."
The combined impact of Deneb in 2024 and Pectra in 2025 has helped the Ethereum ecosystem move further down an intricate development roadmap. Unifying liquidity, interoperability, and improving overall user experience has been a top priority.
"I think the big focus now is on the interop, on the tooling, and on the standards, uh, and accelerating that idea that all the chains around the Ethereum should feel very much like a single ecosystem and it should be very natural for the users to transfer between them, to use all the applications that, uh, just just flow through different chains if, if they need to. There are clear challenges. I felt very like that UX interop was the really the biggest challenge of them all, and now I start feeling better about it."
"We are doing two things right now. First, uh, we are putting some emphasis on the L1 on scalability and on sustainability of the L2, with a lot of consideration about the future performance of the security aspect of things, and also of potentially the token itself, of course, but also upgrading how the the user experience is going to be unfolded in the next years, and that's, um, that's a very, very good signal that Ethereum is going to be more accessible from a usability standpoint."
But the balancing act remains a precarious one. How does the Ethereum L1 ensure that validators are incentivized to keep the network running and avoid getting into a performance arm wrestle with new-age layer ones like Solana, Sui, and Aptos?
"I'm pretty optimistic about it in the sense that it does look like they're saying like, okay, maybe let's focus on DA and execution more than personally I would like, but without really getting up kind of this this benefit that we have from a settlement perspective. But I think it is dangerous, right? If they go down this road of trying to compete on execution too heavily, likelihood is they will end up getting out competed by those who are trying to do the exact same thing."
Mertum offers an outsider's perspective. The CEO of Helius, a company that provides infrastructure and tooling for Solana developers, says Ethereum's L2 approach to scaling has fundamentally misaligned incentives.
"The future for Ethereum. So their their new plan is to scale the L1 a bit better so that they can serve roll-ups better. The only way that can actually mean something useful for ETH is either if ETH makes revenue from those L2s, which then kind of hurts the L2s, 'cause they can just switch to a cheaper alternative, then they'll say something like, well, you can export ETH the currency, and then everybody will use it a currency and all this stuff. But like the L2s don't have that incentive, right? Like if you're based, you want the best user experience. USDC works totally fine."
"What we did in the last few months was um refocus the client developers attention on the next 6 to 12 months, saying, you know, scale, accelerate scale one, uh, scale blobs, and improve interop UX. Uh, so that was to ensure that we build confidence for everyone building on the Ethereum ecosystem that, that there will be always attention to to those aspects. And then now it's, it starts to feel right to start talking about what happens next."
While the volume of criticism was deafeningly loud over the past year, conversations at ECC gave a sense of optimism about the future of Ethereum. This optimism is not rooted in fervor but rather in utility and on-chain metrics. More than 90% of tokenized real-world assets are being built on Ethereum. BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, is tokenizing securities on Ethereum. Robinhood grabbed headlines in CAN with the launch of its own Ethereum-based layer 2 squarely aimed at RWA and securities tokenization.
"If you think is it DeFi versus TradFi, I would say absolutely no chance that DeFi will not dominate all the global markets. It will be there. It will happen on Ethereum. There's no meaningful alternative. Everything else is a ghost chain and going to the wrong direction and pushing and lobbying to still be able to exist uh with a lot of different interests, a lot of vested interest. I've seen six, maybe five or six generations of Ethereum kids all go into the the top 10 on CoinMarketCap and out and leaving a lot of u of um of project, project managers on the sidewalk saying like, oh damn, I should have picked Ethereum. So now that we have the regulation in place, both in the US, well, almost in the US, in the EU, and soon in the Asia, it's time to be realistic. Where is everybody going? Everybody is going on something Ethereum."
"Ethereum got dragged into the execution game. Whereas the Ethereum's, you know, core value proposition is this decentralized, highly decentralized, sovereign, resistance, permissionless settlement layer. And if Ethereum plays well to its strengths and focuses on being the best settlement layer, we already have enough network effects and the momentum around the layer 2's world that the whole Web3 will get created around Ethereum."
Still, builders have plenty of advice to give the Ethereum Foundation and the wider Ethereum ecosystem. Competitor analysis and greater transparency could prove critical in reestablishing Ethereum's dominance as the go-to smart contract blockchain protocol.
"The crypto industry has been highly competitive in influence. The the main goal of all chains and and and projects is adoption. Chains like Solana and ecosystems like Solana are coordinating their efforts, um, more, um, like effectively. Then you're also seeing now Aptos and others, just they they're also their look and their vibe and their brand is appealing to more of the um to to their their target audience, which right now is institutional adoption, enterprises. So that's who they want to go after. I think some things that we can learn from other ecosystems is their go-to market and their approach to really help builders not just go from idea to app, but to go from app to business and really, you know, build an app and then grow the app, get funding for that app, and continue to build a sustainable business around it. I think other ecosystems do that really well. I think that in the next 5 to 10 years, all of Wall Street is going to be on-chain. Which chain is it going to be on? It should be on Ethereum. It shouldn't be on Solana. But the reason it is on Solana is because they're the ones who who who step up and talk to American policymakers and regulators. They lobby. They understand what needs to be said and who needs to be spoken to."
"The success of these protocols is going to be driven by transaction fees, which is going to be driven by usage. We have stablecoins, definitely product-market fit. Um, we have some trading platforms, uh, which I think is going to be driven by real-world assets, uh, maybe, you know, traditional stocks coming online, or onto the blockchain, which will add significant volume. Um, but as long as we continue to find use cases like that, then I think you'll see Ethereum be five or 10 times bigger from a usage perspective within that time frame."
The impact of significant pressure on the Ethereum Foundation has undoubtedly brought meaningful change to the institution that has been the north star for the ecosystem. Protocol, financial, and personnel changes have appeased many concerns raised by detractors. Whether correlated, the price of ETH has rebounded midway through 2025 on the tailwinds of significant institutional adoption and affirmation. Renowned investor Tom Lee grabbed headlines as his NYC-listed firm Bitmine doubled down on an Ethereum treasury reserve strategy, which now holds over 566,000 ETH. Betting platform Sharpink Gaming announced a $425 million private equity deal to launch an ETH-based corporate treasury strategy and nominated Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin as chairman of its board of directors. There are clear signs of resurgence for Ethereum. Even if debate rages over what matters most: mission or price, security or decentralization, resilience or growth.