If you believe Ethereum’s legion of critics on X, the blockchain is dying. On one side, it’s being beaten as ultra-sound money by Bitcoin, and on the other, it is outdone by faster and cheaper transactions by Solana.
Fee revenue for the layer 1 has “collapsed” by 99% in the past six months as “extractive L2s” steal all the users, transactions and fee revenue while paying virtually nothing to the base layer. That’s made ETH slightly inflationary again, with its price sliding.
The L2s are siloed from one another, and each has a financial incentive to maximize its own revenue at the expense of ETH. Base charged users $2.5 million in fees last month and gave just $11,100 back to the L1. OP mainnet is reportedly raking in $321.31 for every $1 it funnels back to Ethereum.
“ETH is in a death spiral,” proclaimed Bitcoin maximalist Fred Kreuger, who claims the network’s plummeting fee revenue of just $73 million a year spells certain doom and cannot justify its $300-billion market cap.
So, given this grim picture, it may be a surprise to discover that key figures in the Ethereum ecosystem aren’t more worried. They believe that despite some challenges, the Ethereum roadmap is still on track, even if critics are painting it as a highway to hell.
Maybe that’s just because they’re a lot more confident in where the roadmap will end up. Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake told The Rollup podcast this week that if Ethereum can make a few course corrections to its roadmap, it’ll be a case of “winner takes all.”
“We can get to 10 million transactions per second (TPS) within the next 10 years. And that’s enough for the whole world. It’s 100 transactions per day, per human,” he said, predicting a multitrillion-dollar market cap.
Skip ahead to the proposed solution to fix the roadmap
Bitcoin maxi Fred Krueger only has Ethereum’s best interests at heart. (X)
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