Original author | Konstantin Lomashuk , Artem Kotelskiy
Compiled by | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )
Translator | Dingdang ( @XiaMiPP )
Editors note: Recently, US listed companies have begun to re-recognize Ethereum. SharpLink Gaming plans to invest up to $1 billion in ETH as a strategic reserve by selling shares; BTCS has also purchased 3,450 ETH for about $8.42 million. These trends may be sending a clear signal: ETH is transforming from on-chain fuel to enterprise-level strategic assets.
From an experimental platform for the developer community to DeFi infrastructure, and then to long-term configuration in corporate finance, the role of Ethereum is undergoing a profound transformation. In this wave of value reassessment, how should we understand the technical logic and economic model behind ETH?
Odaily Planet Daily translated and refined the in-depth article Ethereum Roadmap: Becoming the Root Chain of the World Computer co-authored by Konstantin Lomashuk, an early investor in Ethereum and co-founder of Lido, and Artem Kotelskiy, head of research at Cyber•Fund and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton. This article systematically sorts out the development trajectory of Ethereum, the evolution of the protocol, the expansion path, and its positioning in the Rollup era, and attempts to answer a key question: Why is ETH worth holding for the long term?
Note: Since the original text is long, in order to improve readability, the translator deleted and optimized some content without affecting the original meaning.
DeFi: Ethereum’s first product-market fit (PMF)
Since its inception, Ethereum has been committed to building a globally shared, trustless computing platform. After ten years of development, it has grown from an early technical experiment to the core foundation of decentralized finance (DeFi), the block space market, and even the on-chain application ecosystem.
But to understand how ETH has come to where it is today, we must start from a key turning point - the product market fit (PMF) of DeFi . It coincided with the bear market from 2018 to 2020. With the emergence of protocols such as ERC 20, Uniswap, DAI, Aave, and Compound, Ethereum gradually evolved into a self-custodial, composable, and permissionless financial system. The outbreak of DeFi is a natural fit between technological innovation and market demand.
The DeFi Summer in 2020 marked the climax of this, with the amount of locked funds rising rapidly, the on-chain transaction volume surpassing the centralized trading platform for the first time, and the network value of ETH began to emerge. However, the high transaction fees that followed also exposed the bottleneck of Ethereums scalability and laid the groundwork for the future transformation of the technical route.
ETHs value transition: from EIP-1559 to The Merge
If DeFi allows Ethereum to demonstrate its practical value, then the two upgrades of EIP-1559 and The Merge give ETH the logic of long-term value.
In 2021, EIP-1559 was launched, which completely changed the fee mechanism of Ethereum. The original priority bidding model was replaced by the base fee (Base Fee), and this part of the fee paid by all users no longer belongs to the miners, but is directly destroyed. This means that the more active the network is, the more ETH is destroyed, the less inflation pressure there is, and the stronger the value support of ETH.
The indigo part shows that ETH has begun to realize “value reflux” through the destruction mechanism.
In September 2022, Ethereum completed a historic upgrade: the consensus mechanism switched from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) , marking the official launch of The Merge. This change is technically extremely difficult, but also extremely critical - it reduces Ethereums energy consumption by 8,000 times and reduces the annualized issuance rate required for network security from 4% to less than 1% .
After that, ETHs net inflation rate turned negative for quite a long time.
Green represents the weekly new issuance of ETH, orange represents the weekly destruction of ETH, and blue represents the net difference between the two
Long-term beliefs in the Rollup era: cooperation and parasitism?
Scaling is the core problem of Ethereum. Faced with the dilemma of decentralization, security and scalability, Ethereum finally chose the Rollup solution. Rollup puts transaction execution off-chain and only writes state changes and data to the main chain, which not only ensures the security of the main chain, but also greatly improves transaction throughput.
This also transforms Ethereum from a simple execution platform to a security layer + data availability layer, forming a Rollup-centric expansion route.
However, Rollup is not just a technological change, it also changes the logic of ETHs value flow. In the past, users paid fees directly to the main chain, but now most transactions are completed through Rollup, and the demand for direct transactions on the main chain has decreased . Rollup earns revenue by reselling block space, but since the Cancun upgrade, its direct cost expenditure on the main chain has been greatly reduced, triggering a discussion of parasitism. In fact, Rollup is more of a business expansion of Ethereum, relying on the security and data services of the main chain to bring more users and transactions.
Although the transaction demand of the main chain has declined, the expansion and upgrade of the main chain are still being actively promoted, with the goal of increasing the processing capacity by a hundred or even a thousand times in the next few years, providing stronger security and data support for L2. Rollup and the main chain together form a complementary ecosystem, with both division of labor and collaboration, laying the foundation for the sustainable development of Ethereum in the future.
Ethereum Status Index: Crisis and Deep Factors Analysis
Since the collapse of FTX in 2022, the crypto industry as a whole has maintained growth, but ETH performance has lagged significantly behind Bitcoin (BTC) and Solana (SOL). ETH prices are highly correlated with Ethereum network fees, and fee growth has been weak since 2022, especially compared with Solanas performance in the 2018-2022 cycle and this cycle, and revenue pressure is obvious. There are three main reasons:
Factor A: Rollup “parasitism”
Although Rollup makes profits through user transaction fees, it currently does not return enough value to the Ethereum mainnet.
Judging from the data, although this factor exists, it currently has little impact on overall revenue. Rollups current total weekly revenue is only at the level of several million US dollars, and its handling fees are low, partly because the sorter of rollup can support a gas limit much higher than the main network , so they do not need to charge users high handling fees like L1 networks.
More importantly, it is too early to question whether rollup has not contributed back to the mainnet. In fact, the Ethereum community accidentally adopted the strategy of providing data availability (DA) space to rollup for free in order to attract as many aggregation layers as possible. This concession is the correct way to build an ecosystem in the early stage.
Factor B: L1 strategic focus shifts to DA, and mainnet construction is marginalized
Since Ethereum launched the Rollup route, its strategy and user growth focus have almost entirely shifted towards rollup, while the expansion and maintenance of the mainnet have been relatively neglected.
This bias is true to some extent. When Ethereum was solving the problem of high mainnet fees, it chose to bet on Rollup for the future. This all in strategy ignored the potential of L1 itself. Looking back now, as the problem of Rollup fragmentation gradually emerged and we gradually found feasible L1 expansion paths (such as access lists and the development of zkEVM), we will find that the strategic under-allocation of L1 may be a bit excessive.
However, it must be admitted that this judgment is based on hindsight. The Rollup route was a pragmatic move to deal with the main network congestion problem at the time, and solutions such as zkEVM were still a long way off. Therefore, it was difficult to reasonably allocate resources between L1 and DA at the time.
In addition, even if we now have a clear path to increase the L1 gas limit by 100 times, to achieve performance of more than 10,000 TPS and support a comprehensive public chain computing platform, some form of horizontal sharding is still inevitable. In this context, choosing a Rollup-first strategy at that time is still a reasonable decision.
Factor C: Rollup’s DA demand has not yet exceeded the mainnet’s DA supply
This is the most critical and overlooked underlying issue at the moment: Rollup’s demand for data availability space (DA) has not yet substantially exceeded Ethereum’s supply.
Rollup’s sorter is very efficient in packaging transactions and uploading them to the mainnet, with a very high compression rate, which causes them to consume much less blob space than the theoretical value. In addition, some user activities in this cycle (such as Meme coin transactions) were also diverted to Tron and Solana.
Before the Pectra upgrade (May 7, 2025), based on 3 blobs per block, Ethereums DA supply was about 210 TPS. Until November 2024, this supply exceeded market demand. Even though demand has risen since then, the blob gas price shows that its price has not risen significantly, indicating that demand has not yet overwhelmed supply. Recently, Pectra doubled its blob target to 6/block, and DA supply has increased again, far exceeding actual demand.
Therefore, factor C is actually the fundamental variable that affects factors A and B. Once the demand for blob space from Rollup truly exceeds the supply, blob fees will enter the market discovery stage, and the overall fee structure of the Ethereum network will undergo a qualitative change.
How to evaluate the value of ETH? The business logic of Ethereum
Is ETH a productive asset or a currency? We firmly believe that ETH should be a productive asset first and a currency second .
The reason is that Ethereums strongest moat comes from its technological advantages : the trust foundation and stability that have been tested for many years, the neutrality and anti-censorship capabilities brought by decentralization, the leading DeFi ecosystem, high-quality RD and developer communities, and a strong network activity guarantee mechanism. Ethereum is a truly unstoppable global computer.
Secondly, as a productive asset that relies on technology adoption, the monetary value of ETH can be stabilized and strengthened. Although ETH as a currency is more likely to cross the technology iteration cycle, the most reliable path is to first build Ethereum as a technology platform, ensure that its economic model is sustainable, and then the monetary attributes will naturally emerge. On the contrary, simply hyping ETH as a currency cannot establish a solid foundation.
In short, the price of ETH is composed of three parts: the discounted value of future fees, the monetary premium (as a store of value, medium of exchange, and even unit of account), and the speculative premium (including cultural and meme value). Although the latter two have a greater impact, the key to strengthening these three is to maximize the basic network income , which is the foundation of ETHs value.
Ethereum’s Long-Term Rollup Strategy: Why It’s Right? The Truth About the Battle with Solana
The reason why Ethereum firmly chooses the Rollup-centric expansion route is very clear: it is the only architectural design that can balance security, scalability and neutrality.
From the perspective of technology supply, Ethereum is currently the most secure and decentralized smart contract platform. Through the validating bridge and data availability layer (DA), Ethereum can wholesale the main chain security to Rollup, helping them build their own chains without having to rebuild a trust system.
From the perspective of market demand, users ultimately don’t care which chain they are using - they only care about “which chain is the cheapest and safest to trade on”. In the long run, the most rational choice is to be a Rollup, buy security, buy DA, buy consensus, and connect directly to Ethereum. This will naturally form a market convergence phenomenon: Rollup will build its own services around Ethereum’s “neutral ledger” like an enterprise, rather than being dispersed to other isolated chains.
Ethereum vs Solana
Based on 2024 fee revenue, some believe Solana has begun to surpass Ethereum in the block space market. However, Solanas hardware-centric strategy is risky, and the network periodically overloads. If blockchain is to realize its full potential, that is, to migrate financial infrastructure on-chain at a large scale, Solana will eventually need to turn to sharding, and Ethereum is already far ahead in security, Rollup infrastructure, and ecosystem adoption.
More importantly, most of Solana’s on-chain activity comes from the Memecoin craze. Data shows that such transactions once accounted for more than 50% of its DEX trading volume. But Memecoin is a short-term, zero-sum game phenomenon - after the heat is over, its high income myth will be difficult to sustain.
In contrast, Ethereum focuses on high-stickiness scenarios such as DeFi. These protocols are not driven by fanatical speculation, but rather the on-chain migration of real financial behaviors.
The most notable and important difference: Solana’s validator nodes are centralized, while Ethereum has the most diverse network of stakers in the world. This decentralization itself is the strongest moat.
Problems with the Rollup Strategy
If Rollup is on the right track and Ethereum’s long-term future is bright, why is ETH price performing poorly?
On a technical level, the biggest flaw of Rollup is the lack of default interoperability, which leads to state fragmentation and seriously affects the user and developer experience.
On a business level, the key issue is that Ethereum has not yet clearly communicated Rollup’s business strategy:
Short-term adoption strategy: How to drive rapid growth of Rollup?
Long-term moat: Why won’t Rollup turn to other data availability platforms?
Rollup’s business strategy: expansion, differentiation, and moat
1. Ethereum should prioritize expansion and continue to provide sufficient and low-cost data availability (DA)
Ethereum is in a highly competitive and fast-changing technology network market, where the winners will enjoy strong network effects. In this environment, the right strategy is to provide high-quality products and quickly expand the user base at very low or almost free prices, which is also the growth path of most successful technology networks.
Therefore, Ethereum must keep the price of data availability (DA) low to minimize the threshold for Rollup access. Ethereum provided 3 blobs of capacity after the Cancun upgrade, and supply exceeded demand in the short term, effectively suppressing prices. Although this strategy was not intentional, it achieved good results.
2. Solve Rollup interoperability and improve user and developer experience
Interoperability is the biggest shortcoming of Ethereum in the Rollup era. Fragmentation seriously affects users and developers. Solving interoperability can unify the experience and narrow the gap with integrated chains. It is also the key to building a liquidity moat.
The community is actively promoting solutions such as ERC-7683 second-level medium-sized asset cross-chain exchange and 2-of-3 OP+ZK+TEE hour-level large-value asset cross-chain bridge.
3. Differentiation strategy and moat building
Ethereum needs to differentiate itself in DA services to attract marginal Rollup customers, while building a moat to lock in ecological customers.
The key moats come from three major network effects: trust, liquidity, and composability. At present, the demand for cross-Rollup composability is still unclear, and the main value is concentrated in trust and liquidity. After solving interoperability, these two will naturally expand from Ethereum L1 to the Rollup ecosystem.
In terms of trust , Rollup enjoys the highest security through Ethereum DA. The security of independent chains is relatively weak. The security of Rollup using Ethereum DA continues to increase, and the moat continues to consolidate.
In terms of liquidity , the institutional-level liquidity of Ethereum L1 is an important factor in choosing Rollup. After Rollup is connected to Ethereum DA, it can obtain institutional liquidity from the entire ecosystem, greatly improving capital efficiency and forming a solid moat.
Therefore, the market will push Rollup to use Ethereum DA for the highest security and liquidity. Ethereum should strengthen these two advantages and attract institutional clients with its brand and trust.
The path of value return: from maximizing fees to maximizing value carrying
When Ethereum expands data availability (DA) to the million TPS level (such as through solutions such as 2D PeerDAS), and the Rollup ecosystem is voluntarily and firmly bound to Ethereum DA, Ethereum will obtain significant transaction fee income.
At the main chain level, the widespread adoption and enterprise applications of DeFi will become the main driving force, and the popularity of Rollup will further amplify this effect. At the same time, Rollup will also pay for interoperability and settlement services, further contributing to revenue.
At the DA level, the key to achieving sustainable economics is to increase the minimum blob price. The specific approach is to monitor the overall revenue of Rollup and set a reasonable minimum price so that Rollup transfers a certain proportion of value to Ethereum.
For example, in the next few years, assuming that Rollup occupies the CeDeFi payment market, processes about 10,000 TPS, and has an annual revenue of billions of dollars, and the Ethereum DA supply exceeds 10,000 TPS. At this time, although the blob transaction fee will not fully enter the market price discovery, if the minimum fee is set to 0.3 cents per DA transaction, it can bring about $1 billion in annual revenue to ETH holders.
Further covering high-frequency trading markets, such as social, trading, and coordination between AI agents, Rollups TPS can reach 30,000, and the DA fee income it brings will exceed US$10 billion, and the transaction cost will still be less than one cent.
This type of income is affected by the price of ETH and other factors. The minimum price needs to be adjusted dynamically and is expected to be determined by community consensus, similar to todays gas limit mechanism. In the future, it is necessary to further study the optimal pricing strategy for blobs, such as improving the connection with the Ethereum L1 fee market. In addition, as Ethereum transitions to zkEVM or RISC-V, new technologies such as SNARK infrastructure will help improve the efficiency of fee capture.
The key is that at this stage, we should not rush to extract value directly from transactions, but should maximize support and promote high-value activities in Ethereum block and blob space. This will not only generate and enhance network effects, but also help Ethereum seize the expanding block space market and consolidate its economic foundation. The path for value repatriation is therefore very clear.
