Ethereum remains the most consistent blockchain ever built. It introduced programmable money, anchored the decentralized finance sector (DeFi) and serves as the main platform for the world’s most secure smart contracts.
By old measures, its dominance is unchallenged as it possesses the deepest developer ecosystem, the largest pool of locked capital, and plays a central role in the settlement of regulated stablecoins.
However, technological irrelevance rarely manifests itself in a sudden collapse. It creeps in quietly, masked by statistics that describe where the market has been rather than where it is going.
The phrase “we still have TVL” (Total Value Locked) has become shorthand for this tension among Ethereum insiders. While TVL historically defined success, it increasingly measures assets parked as collateral rather than capital in motion.
The concern now emerging is that the ecosystem is leaning on these old metrics, while the real velocity of money is shifting elsewhere. Whether that distinction will matter in 2030 is now the central question for the sector.
The data divergence
The ‘turning’ story has returned, but this time it is driven by activity rather than market capitalization. The data paints a grim picture of divergence.
According to NansenEthereum’s annual revenue is down about 76% year over year to about $604 million.
The decline follows the Dencun and Fusaka network upgrade, which has greatly reduced the costs paid by Layer 2 networks.
In contrast, Solana generated around $657 million during the same period, while TRON raked in nearly $601 million, driven almost entirely by stablecoin speed in emerging markets.
The split is even sharper when viewed through the lens of Artemis factsthat captures user behavior rather than just 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 ignoring these figures breeds a dangerous complacency. He has warned that Ethereum “needs to be paranoid” about adverse data even if the TVL remains high.
According to him, the challenge is not just competition, but also the temptation to defend leadership by using indicators that become less relevant as crypto’s primary use cases shift.
However, a critical view requires nuance. While Artemis’s numbers show Solana winning 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 messaging. This activity generates substantial volume, but arguably delivers less economic value per byte than higher-stake Ethereum settlement flows.
As a result, the market effectively splits, with Solana becoming the “NASDAQ” of quick execution, while Ethereum remains the “FedWire” of final settlement.
The crisis of urgency
But explaining away the competition as ‘spam’ risks missing the deeper cultural shift. The threat to Ethereum is not just that users are leaving, but that the urgency to retain them has been lost years ago.
Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, crystallized this sentiment in reflection on his departure from the ecosystem.
He pointed out that his ETH conviction was broken in November 2017 at Devcon3 in Cancun noted:
“ETH was the fastest asset in human history at the time with a market cap of $100 billion. Gas costs were skyrocketing. There was a clear need to scale as quickly as possible. There was never any urgency.”
This observation that the wartime platform did not have the speed necessary to achieve mass adoption frames the current “MySpace” risk. MySpace didn’t disappear because there were no users; it lost its priority when engagement shifted to platforms that offered a smoother experience.
For Ethereum, this “smooth experience” had to be delivered by Layer 2 rollups (L2s) such as Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
While successful in reducing costs, this “modular” roadmap has created a fragmented user experience.
Furthermore, the direct economic link between user activity and ETH value growth has weakened as liquidity spreads across disjointed rollups and L2s pay significantly less ‘rent’ to Ethereum for data storage.
The risk is that Ethereum remains the secure base layer, but the profit margins and brand loyalty fully accrue to the L2s above it.
The pivot to acceleration
Against that backdrop, the Ethereum Foundation has begun to adjust its operational posture.
The long-held emphasis on protocol ‘ossification’, the idea that Ethereum should change as little as possible, has softened since early 2025 as development priorities have shifted towards faster iteration and performance improvements.
Key leadership has cemented this shift in the restructuring. The appointment of Tomasz Stańczak, founder of the engineering firm Nethermind, alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang as executive director, marked a step towards technical urgency.
The technical manifestation of this new leadership is the Pectra and Fusaka upgrade shipped this year.
At the same time, the ‘Beam Chain’ roadmap, championed by EF researcher Justin Drake, proposes a wholesale overhaul of the consensus layer, focusing on 4-second slot times and single-slot finality.
This suggests that Ethereum is finally trying to answer the scaling question at the main layer. The goal is to compete directly with the performance of integrated chains like Solana, without sacrificing the decentralization that makes ETH a pristine collateral asset.
This represents a high-stakes gamble in trying to upgrade a $400 billion network on the fly. However, leadership appears to have calculated that the risk of execution failure is now less than the risk of market stagnation.
The final verdict
The “we still have TVL” defense is a backward-looking comfort blanket. In the financial markets, liquidity is a mercenary activity. It stays where it can best be treated.
Ethereum’s bull case remains credible, but depends on its execution. If the ‘Beam Chain’ upgrades can be delivered quickly and the L2 ecosystem can resolve its fragmentation issues to form a united front, Ethereum can consolidate its position as a global settlement layer.
However, if the use of high-speed chains continues to increase while Ethereum relies solely on its role as a collateral warehouse, it faces a future where it is systemically important but commercially secondary.
By 2030, the market will likely worry less about the “history” of smart contracts and more about invisible, frictionless infrastructure.
So the coming years will test whether Ethereum can remain the default choice for that infrastructure, or just a specialized part of it.
