For most of the past decade, David Hoffman has been one of the loudest advocates of this claim. $ETH.
As the co-founder of Bankless, arguably the world’s most influential Ethereum media asset, his bullish stance on the network’s native assets was more than just a personal position. It was my professional identity.
Last week, Hoffman sold it all.
In an essay cross-published on Bankless and X, “Why I Sold Mine” $ETH” Hoffman was careful to frame the decision as a conclusion rather than a bearish verdict.
” $ETH “The theory of money did not fail,” he wrote. Ethereum is $ETH Worth the price, and I don’t know $ETH No matter how high or low it is, it is valued as an asset. ”
This essay landed in a community that was already fraying at the edges. And the debate it has sparked cuts to the heart of a question that Ethereum has been circulating for years: Can the network win while its native token is losing?
Givers, not takers
Hoffmann’s argument is architectural. He argues that Ethereum was designed to maximize the value of the applications, layer 2 networks, and stablecoin protocols built on top of it, not to maximize the value of Ethereum. $ETH holder.
“Ethereum is a giver, not a taker,” he wrote. “It provides L2 with the world’s most secure blockspace, at a cost. It tokenizes the entire world’s assets, at a cost. It secures billions of dollars in DeFi, at a cost. Ethereum receives no markup for anything it does.”
As a result, he argues, Ethereum’s success as an infrastructure could entrench other forms of currency rather than currency. $ETH itself. He points to stablecoins as Exhibit A. Ethereum hosted $3 billion in stablecoins in 2020. At the time of his writing, that number is $163 billion, a 54-fold increase. The overwhelming majority of its value is denominated in dollars, not dollars. $ETH.
“The utility that Ethereum provides helps expand the monetary network of anything that has money,” Hoffman wrote, noting that the U.S. government currently views Ethereum’s stablecoin infrastructure as a tool to extend dollar hegemony.
“Architecturally, $ETH is not a priority in Ethereum and this is a feature, not a bug,” he added.$ETH It only makes money if Ethereum wins the battles it structurally refuses to fight. ”
rebuttal
Not everyone accepts that networks and tokens are so clearly separable. Joseph Chalom, CEO of Sharplink, the largest Ethereum treasury company, and a former BlackRock digital asset executive who spent 20 years in fintech and institutional strategy, offered a competing reading on X this week.
“There is no Ethereum without Ethereum.” $ETH“Assets and networks are inseparable,” Chalom wrote.
Chalom argued that today’s Ethereum critics are repeating the mistakes made by Amazon skeptics in the early 2000s, fixating on short-term metrics while neglecting to build the underlying infrastructure. “TAM is not a cryptocurrency transaction,” he wrote. “It’s the entire global financial system. $ETHThe intrinsic value of is tied to network expansion. ”
Sharplink is betting billions of dollars $ETH And it recently announced a $125 million DeFi yield fund alongside Galaxy Digital. Mr. Shalom framed his company’s stance as a direct response to the surrender narrative.
“In almost every market cycle, the moment when retail capitulates and sentiment is at its lowest is when disciplined capital takes a chance,” he said.
Fundamental uncertainty
This discussion takes place against a broader backdrop of uncertainty at the Ethereum Foundation. Multiple senior executives have recently left the organization with minimal explanation.
Ethereum co-founder Vitok Buterin insisted that X’s departure reflected strategy rather than dysfunction.
“If we want to attract outside capital to important missions,” he wrote, “we really need people with great technical talent, public respect, and mission alignment outside of EF.”
As for matters of personal belief, he added that nearly 90% of his net worth remains. $ETH.
Former EF researcher Danclad Feist argued that the problem with X is structural. EF manages “less than 0.1% of the total” $ETH” receives no staking or fee income and has no direct financial stake in Ethereum market performance.
“The way to save Ethereum is for the community to establish an organization that is economically aligned with and accountable to Ethereum,” Feist wrote.
what happens next
Either way, this discussion revealed something the community has been discussing in vague terms for years. That means Ethereum’s path to infrastructure relevance is all but settled. The path to relevance as a financial asset is not. These are two different arguments and require two different answers.
Whether Ethereum can find a new story that explains both its architectural generosity and the need to capture value for its tokens is a question the community must now answer.
