1 month ago
TORONTO — Ethereum conscionable completed its most important upgrade successful much than a year, but the milestone comes aft a turbulent agelong for the blockchain. The price of ether (ETH) has declined, developers person migrated to rival platforms, and the Ethereum Foundation — a nonprofit steward of the task — has faced criticism for a deficiency of coordination and vision.
Speaking connected a sheet astatine CoinDesk’s Consensus league successful Toronto, Paul Brody — planetary blockchain person astatine EY and president of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance — and Josh Stark of the Ethereum Foundation, offered a much optimistic presumption of the roadworthy ahead.
There are 2 things the assemblage is looking for, Stark said. First, “the ecosystem needs stronger enactment … Stronger enactment connected the roadmap, connected executing that roadmap, and truly assistance coordinating the ecosystem to tackle the large challenges.”
Second, the web needs amended messaging. “Ethereum's fundamentals are incredibly strong, but fewer radical are lasting up to archer the communicative of that ecosystem and to boost the unthinkable worldly being built,” Stark said.
For each its caller struggles, Stark and Brody maintained that Ethereum remains the astir innovative and forward-focused task successful crypto.
Brody suggested that concerns astir the foundation’s enactment are peculiarly overblown, giving the Ethereum Foundation’s erstwhile enforcement director, Aya Miyaguchi, apical marks for her tenure, which began successful 2018 and ended this year.
“Ethereum is simply a proof-of-stake concatenation with much than 120 layer-2 networks,” said Broday. Network capacity, helium added, is adjacent "300 and 450 cardinal transactions a day." Additionally, "transaction fees astatine the L2 level — they mean nether 1 penny per transaction for the past 3 months," said Brody. "If I measurement backmost and look astatine [Miyaguchi's] tenure precise objectively successful presumption of the results, I would accidental A plus.”
Miyaguchi transitioned to Ethereum Foundation president successful March 2025, installing Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak arsenic its caller co-executive directors — portion of a leadership restructuring aimed astatine enhancing the foundation's strategical focus.
Some critics person argued Ethereum’s roadmap has relied excessively heavy connected layer-2 rollups — autarkic blockchains that process transactions cheaply and rapidly earlier "settling" their past connected Ethereum’s main chain. Brody defended the network's rollup-centric roadmap: “I'm delighted,” helium said.
While layer-2s similar Optimism, Arbitrum and Coinbase's Base web person lowered users' fees — mostly considered the main headwind to wider web adoption — skeptics accidental they besides present caller security risks and fragmentation hurdles that endanger Ethereum's cardinal worth proposition.
“Ethereum is being Ethereum,” Brody said. “Which is, place a problem, hole it, and determination connected to the adjacent problem. In presumption of the biggest occupation that we were dealing with implicit the past fewer years, it was scale, right? Going from being capable to bash a cardinal transactions a time to 450 cardinal web capableness is great.”
“All ecosystems are going to extremity up with thing similar an L2 roadmap with modularity and specialization,” Stark added. “We're conscionable the ones that person gone furthest down this path, and we recovered the twists and the turns and the challenges connected that road, and we're dealing with them.”
Ether (ETH), the network’s autochthonal token, has agelong been considered a blue-chip crypto asset. But successful caller months, it has underperformed comparative to immoderate competitors. Network tokens are often viewed arsenic a proxy for an ecosystem’s wide health.
Bitcoin, Stark noted, has successfully positioned itself arsenic a reliable store of value, helping it upwind the marketplace much favorably than Ethereum. “Ethereum has a much analyzable narrative,” helium said.
Still, Stark expressed assurance that the marketplace would yet bespeak Ethereum’s deeper value.
“The world's not going to halt learning astir these technologies and these systems,” helium said. “The satellite is going to person an appetite for a somewhat much complicated, but conscionable arsenic existent worth proposition. And I deliberation we're starting to spot that now. So I deliberation that markets yet terms value. And I deliberation that Ethereum is the astir important task successful crypto and ever has been.”
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