Ethereum remains the most important blockchain ever built. It introduces programmable money, powers the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, and serves as the world’s most secure leading venue for smart contracts.
By traditional standards, its dominance is undisputed, as it holds the deepest developer ecosystem, the largest pool of locked capital, and plays a central role in regulated stablecoin payments.
But technology irrelevance rarely collapses suddenly. It’s creeping in quietly, masked by indicators that describe where the market has been rather than where it’s going.
The phrase “Total Value Locked” has become shorthand for this tension among Ethereum insiders. While TVL has historically defined success, it increasingly values assets held as collateral rather than capital in motion.
The concern that is now emerging is that the ecosystem relies on these traditional metrics while the actual velocity of money moving elsewhere. Whether that distinction will matter by 2030 is now a central question for the industry.
Differences in data
The “reversal” narrative is back, but this time it’s driven by activity rather than market cap. The data highlight the stark state of divergence.
Ethereum’s annual revenue fell about 76% from a year ago to about $604 million, Nansen said.
This decrease is due to the Dencun and Fusaka network upgrades, which significantly reduced the charges paid by the Layer 2 network.
In contrast, Solana generated approximately $657 million over the same period, and TRON, driven almost entirely by the stablecoin’s velocity in emerging markets, earned approximately $601 million.
This divide becomes even clearer when viewed through the lens of Artemis data, which captures user behavior as well as capital depth. In 2025, Solana will have approximately 98 million monthly active users and process 34 billion transactions, surpassing Ethereum in nearly every high-frequency category.
Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik points out that ignoring these metrics breeds dangerous complacency. He warned that even if TVL remains high, Ethereum “needs to be paranoid” about unfavorable data.
In his view, the challenge is not only competition, but also the temptation to protect leadership using metrics that become less relevant as the primary use cases for cryptocurrencies change.
However, critical examination requires nuance. While Artemis’ numbers show that Solana has won the “volume war,” Ethereum is fighting a different battle: a war over economic density.
The majority of Solana’s 34 billion transactions consist of arbitrage bots and consensus messages. Although this activity generates significant volume, it probably has a lower economic value per byte than Ethereum’s high-stakes payment flows.
As a result, the market has effectively split into two, with Solana becoming the “Nasdaq” of fast execution, while Ethereum remains the “Fedwire” of final settlement.
imminent crisis
But describing the competition as “spam” risks missing a deeper cultural shift. The threat to Ethereum is not only that users are leaving, but that the urgency to retain users has disappeared years ago.
Kyle Samani, Managing Partner at Multicoin Capital, embodied this sentiment when reflecting on his exit from the ecosystem.
He pointed out that his ETH conviction was broken at Devcon3 in Cancun in November 2017. He said:
“At the time, ETH was the fastest asset in human history to reach a market cap of $100 billion. Gas prices were skyrocketing. It was clear that we needed to scale quickly. There was never before an urgency.”
Current MySpace risks are shaped by the observation that the platform lacked the “wartime” speed needed to gain mass adoption. MySpace didn’t die because there were no more users. That advantage disappeared as engagement moved to platforms that offered a smoother experience.
In the case of Ethereum, this “smooth experience” was supposed to be provided by Layer 2 rollups (L2) such as Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
While this was successful in lowering prices, this “modular” roadmap resulted in a fragmented user experience.
Furthermore, the direct economic link between user activity and the generation of ETH value is weakening as liquidity is spread across disparate rollups and the “rent” that L2 pays to Ethereum for data storage is significantly reduced.
The risk is that even though Ethereum remains a secure base layer, profit margins and brand loyalty will accrue entirely to the L2 above it.
Pivoting to accelerationism
Against this backdrop, the Ethereum Foundation has begun to adjust its management stance.
The long-standing emphasis on protocol “ossification,” or the idea that Ethereum should change as little as possible, has eased since early 2025 as development priorities have shifted to faster iterations and improved performance.
Critical leadership strengthened this realignment transition. The appointment of Tomasz Stańczak, founder of client engineering firm Nethermind, as executive director alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang signaled a move toward engineering urgency.
The technological manifestation of this new leadership is the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades shipped this year.
At the same time, EF researcher Justin Drake’s “Beam Chain” roadmap proposes a major overhaul of the consensus layer, with the goal of 4-second slot times and single-slot finality.
This suggests that Ethereum is finally trying to answer the scaling problem at the main layer. The goal is to directly compete with the performance of integrated chains like Solana without sacrificing the decentralization that makes ETH the original collateral asset.
This represents a high-stakes gamble to upgrade the $400 billion network in flight. However, leadership now appears to be calculating that the risk of execution failure is lower than the risk of market stagnation.
final verdict
The “TVL is still there” defense is a backwards comfort blanket. In financial markets, liquidity is very important. Stay where you are best treated.
The Ethereum bull case remains credible, but it depends on execution. If “Beam Chain” upgrades are delivered quickly and the L2 ecosystem can solve the fragmentation problem and present a united front, Ethereum can solidify its position as a global payments layer.
However, if Ethereum continues to grow in usage on high-speed chains while relying solely on its role as a collateral warehouse, it faces a systemically important but commercially secondary future.
By 2030, the market will care less about the “history” of smart contracts and more about invisible and frictionless infrastructure.
The next few years will therefore test whether Ethereum can remain the default choice for that infrastructure, or simply a specialized component of that infrastructure.