Chainfeeds Summary:
Scaling is no longer the only goal; security, neutrality, and predictability have once again become core assets of Ethereum.
Article source:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/uL5EuMvwgt3VoMpu9j01Zw
Article Author:
IOSG Ventures
Opinion:
IOSG Ventures: Understanding Ethereum's long-term value hinges not on short-term price fluctuations, but on its consistent design philosophy and value orientation. Its core objective is not efficiency or profit maximization, but rather to become a trustworthy and neutral infrastructure: with open, predictable rules that do not favor any participant or are controlled by a single entity, allowing anyone to participate without permission. The security of ETH and its on-chain assets ultimately relies on the protocol itself, not the credit endorsement of any particular institution. Ethereum's numerous key upgrades also demonstrate a clear and stable decision-making logic: proactively sacrificing short-term protocol revenue in exchange for lower usage costs, a larger ecosystem scale, and stronger system resilience. Its goal is not to become a "tollbooth," but an irreplaceable neutral settlement and trust foundation in the digital economy. Architecturally, the mainnet focuses on the highest level of security and finality, while Layer 2 networks occupy different levels of the connectivity spectrum from the mainnet. Some inherit the mainnet security and pursue efficiency, while others position themselves with differentiated functions, allowing the system to simultaneously serve global settlement and high-performance applications. Ethereum's technological roadmap consistently adheres to long-termism: it chooses a slow and deterministic evolution path, prioritizing system security and trustworthiness. From the transition to PoS to subsequent scaling and confirmation mechanism optimizations, its roadmap pursues sustainable, verifiable, and irreversible correctness. This restrained and robust engineering philosophy is itself a significant source of its long-term value. The positioning of the security settlement layer signifies the establishment of Ethereum's "settlement sovereignty," a crucial shift from a "confederation" to a "federal system," and a significant upgrade in its architecture and core roles. Analogous to history, after the American Revolutionary War, under the Confederation system, the 13 states were like a loose alliance, each issuing its own currency, imposing tariffs on each other, and free-riding on shared defense without bearing responsibility, ultimately leading to a decline in national credit and hindered foreign trade. It wasn't until the new Constitution of 1787 granted the federal government direct taxation power, interstate trade regulation power, and a unified currency, and then with Hamilton assuming state debt, rebuilding national credit, and establishing a national bank, that the United States transformed from a fragmented alliance into a unified market, unleashing economies of scale and attracting capital. Today's Ethereum ecosystem faces a similar dilemma: each L2 instance acts like a sovereign state, possessing its own user base, liquidity pools, and governance tokens. Liquidity is fragmented, leading to significant friction in cross-L2 interactions. While L2 instances benefit from Ethereum's security layer and brand, they struggle to contribute back to L1 value. Locking up liquidity is a rational behavior in the short term, but if all L2 instances act this way, the ecosystem's core competitive advantage will be weakened. Therefore, Ethereum's current roadmap essentially aims to establish a unified settlement and verification system, making L1 the true central hub and allowing ETH to once again become the ecosystem's trust anchor and value capture center. Directly applying traditional corporate valuation models to Ethereum is essentially a category error. Ethereum is not a profit-maximizing company, but rather an open digital economic infrastructure whose goal is to maximize ecosystem scale, security, and censorship resistance. To achieve this goal, it has repeatedly proactively reduced protocol revenue, such as introducing Blob DA through EIP-4844 to structurally reduce L2 data publishing costs and lower L1 revenue from Rollup data. From a company's perspective, this resembles "voluntarily forgoing revenue," but from an infrastructure perspective, it's sacrificing short-term costs for long-term network effects and a neutrality premium. A more reasonable framework is to view Ethereum as a globally neutral settlement and consensus layer, its value stemming from multiple structural demands: the rigid demand for final settlement, the scale of on-chain finance and stablecoins, the impact of staking and burning mechanisms on supply, and the long-term cash flow brought by institutional adoption such as ETFs, corporate treasuries, and RWA. Based on this, its value sources can be divided into four quadrants: security settlement layer, monetary attributes, platform network effects, and protocol revenue. Among these, the security settlement layer is considered the core value anchor, monetary attributes constitute an important demand foundation, platform effects represent growth options, and revenue is more like the cash flow floor in a bear market. As institutions gradually enter, ETH is also shifting from a simple price-exposed asset to a fundamental asset with yield attributes and settlement functions, and its pricing logic is shifting from emotion-driven to structural demand-driven.
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