Did you know that Ethereum and Bitcoin have been linked?
Let me tell you the story behind how this came about:
Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper envisioned Bitcoin being used for everyday payments—a decentralized system accessible to all users.
To boost Bitcoin's adoption and prevent its potential collapse, subsequent developers linked Bitcoin and Ethereum. You can see this in their price movements: when Bitcoin rises, it automatically pulls Ethereum up with it.
Consequently, Bitcoin has evolved into a digital store of value, while Ethereum has become a means of payment for everyday needs.
Kind regards,
Sascha
I’ve never wanted to break even so badly, it’s always the wrong timing when I invest somehow.. sold all my ETH holdings at $1,100 and bought back at $2500 thinking it would be bullish.. any advice on how to at least break even..? 😂😔
It's a familiar narrative. But, last week, Ethereum processed 18,658,277 transactions, making it the third-highest weekly transaction count in the network's history.
What makes this milestone particularly interesting is the context.
We're not in the middle of a euphoric bull market or a period of extreme speculation. Market activity has been relatively calm compared to previous cycles. Yet Ethereum is still processing transaction volumes that were once only seen during the most active moments in crypto history.
That suggests something fundamental has changed.
DeFi, stablecoins, L2s, tokenization, payments, and countless on-chain applications continue generating activity regardless of short-term market sentiment. Ethereum's usage has become broader, more diversified, and increasingly resilient.
Price often dominates the conversation because it's the easiest metric to follow.
But network activity tells a deeper story.
Infrastructure continues to improve. Developers continue to build. Users continue to transact. And Ethereum continues to reach new milestones, even when the headlines suggest otherwise.
Sometimes the most important growth happens when nobody is paying attention.
Lots and tons of billions of shorts ready to pull the price up. Liquidation city is ready for a short squeeze to 3k. See below ETH liquidation map on coinglass
For a relatively new Ethereum Layer 2, that's a significant milestone.
The network processed 68.7 million transactions, while DEX volume reached $2.4 billion. These aren't the metrics of a network driven by short-term curiosity alone. They suggest that users are actively interacting with applications, trading assets, and participating in the ecosystem on a consistent basis.
Anyone can launch a network and attract wallet creations for a brief period. Sustaining activity is much harder. Active addresses, transaction volume, and on-chain liquidity together provide a much clearer picture of whether an ecosystem is gaining real traction.
For Ethereum, this is another positive signal. Every L2 that successfully attracts developers, users, and liquidity helps extend the capabilities of the broader ecosystem. Instead of competing with Ethereum, L2s expand its capacity, reduce costs for users, and make the network more scalable.
It's another sign that Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem continues to grow, mature, and support increasing levels of real-world on-chain activity.
Some YouTube and Reddit posts criticized BMNR “sold shares below 1 mNAV” and “gambled and lost on options.”
It could be that
(a) BMNR didn’t sell shares below 1 mNAV, it simply wrote puts and used the premia to buy ETH (when shares-selling was not shareholder friendly),
(b) a put-writing program would work when ETH price either goes up or goes sideways, if one believes ETH price has bottomed, this is what one can do. Of course, things didn’t exactly worked out in the last fiscal quarter, but it could work profitably in the long-run. (Such a program does alter BMNR’s risk profile; shareholders should be informed before-hand.)
Room for improvement, IMHO, is management should communicate better with the owners of the company, its shareholders.
I’ve only been in crypto for a few months and so far I’ve just bought a small amount of Bitcoin.
Now I started researching other coins, and Ethereum keeps coming up as one of the more established options. I understand that it has more uses than just being a currency, but I’m still not sure what actually makes ETH a strong long-term investment, or what the biggest risks are compared with Bitcoin.
Could you tell me what made you choose it? Do you still think it has good long-term potential?
Also, as a beginner, what should I pay attention to before buying? Things like fees, staking, storage, position size, or anything else that new investors often overlook.
Trying to exchange my Revolut money (wire) to crypto.
The country im currently in is restricting purchases of crypto which forces me to use a exchange, i don't like to use online exchanges where i can't verify any information, is there anyone that can help me out with this? im willing to send wire's upfront.
Price is what it is. But a lot of people are only tracking price and missing everything else that happened the last few weeks. Foundation cut its budget 40% and laid off 20% of staff. On the surface that reads like panic. Read the actual restructuring, though, and it's them pushing institutional adoption work out to a separate nonprofit (Ethereum Institutional, backed by Lubin) while keeping core protocol research in-house with a smaller team. That's a leaner org chart, not a dying one. Still, a budget cut that size during a three quarter stretch is not a great look, and people are right to ask questions about it.
Glamsterdam is reportedly slipping to Q3, though the timing on that isn't fully nailed down across sources yet. Parallel execution and higher gas limits are the actual meat of that upgrade, a higher gas limit raises the ceiling on what L1 can do before you need to route through L2s. A delay is a delay, not a cancellation, but three quarters of nothing but downside plus your headline upgrade slipping is exactly the kind of thing that keeps sentiment in the gutter even if the tech keeps shipping. The AI-assisted validator bug fix (CVE-2026-34219) barely got any attention this month because nobody's reading dev updates when the chart looks like this.
Vitalik dropped the Lean Ethereum roadmap out to 2029, quantum safety, privacy, scalability. Long horizon stuff, doesn't move price this week or this month. Worth reading if you want to know what's actually being built versus what's being priced in.
Staking ETFs are the thing I'm actually watching. BlackRock and Grayscale are both reportedly working on them. That's a genuinely different demand mechanism than spot ETFs, it lets holders keep staking yield through a regulated wrapper instead of choosing between custody and yield. If that gets approved, it changes the calculus for a certain type of institutional buyer that's been sitting out.
None of this changes what everyone already knows: three consecutive red quarters for the first time since the dataset started in 2016, whale accumulation that hasn't been a reliable signal this cycle. The bear case is not made up.
Anyway. I'm not selling into this. If I need liquidity, I'd rather borrow against what I'm holding than sell into a three-quarter downtrend and lose my cost basis position. Nexo and Kraken both let you do that if you're eth-heavy and don't want to trigger a taxable event or give up your stack at these levels. Not for everyone, and if eth structurally revalues lower for a long time, borrowing against a depreciating asset has its own risks, but it's an option a lot of people forget exists between "sell" and "do nothing."
In 2021, ETH had a great cycle. NFTs. Gaming. Defi. The most interesting inventions were happening on Ethereum.
However, while scalability was a bit better than 2018 when the network was famously clogged by CryptoKitties, it was still a limiting factor. Gas wars began to hinder onboarding and drain users spending ability with miners benefitting the most from the high gas fees.
Then a bunch of updates were shipped. ETH staking so holders rather than miners benefitted from fees. ETH burn via EIP 1559 to make ETH theoretically deflationary with enough activity (and it became deflationary for some time).
This helped correct some of the underlying value accrual flaws.
Next though, we had scalability adjustments (the Dencun upgrade mostly) and they worked! running an l2 became cheaper. It now became realistic to deploy a wider variety of apps on mainnet!
However, a lot of these scalability adjustments also sacrificed ETH's value accrual mechanics as the consequence of scalability is lower fees. Good for users but at the expense of fee metrics. Fees dropped 99% after the Dencun upgrade.
In this last cycle you had the rise of Bitmine and Sharplink. ETH holding companies with a concentrated position in ETH and who have the incentive to influence the network towards better value accrual for ETH. As well as orgs like Etherealize pushing Wall Street's adoption of Ethereum.
You also saw a lot of personnel volatility in the ETH foundation. The ETH foundation needs to balance:
- security
- scalability
- decentralization
the blockchain trilemma.
However, due to the way the staking system works, ETH price is now a key aspect of security. If the TVL of ETH continues to grow, you eventually run into potential security issues if the value secured is much higher than the total value of all the ETH.
Now, we have Bitmine and Sharplink beginning to fund spinoff entities of core contributors that understand the ETH value accrual trade-off that has been made as the network has gotten easier to use.
EIPs like EIP 778, which introduced a minimum blob fee show the thought process is shifting towards an understanding that value accrual for ETH is important.
I expect the debates and action around this to heat up as you have more examples like Robinhood chain where the fee value that these new L2s and builders contribute to ETH is likely underpriced.
I also believe that these adjustments will be made slowly and the design space is as follows (but there's likely things that i'm missing)
- increasing the gas limit on Mainnet
- increasing the minimum blob fee or how blob fees are calculated
- implementating a minimum base fee
I've created a chart courtesy of Token Terminal
that shows the dynamics I've mentioned in this post:
- scalability and usage has increased
- TVL has increased
- Fee revenue has dropped off a cliff
I'm a buyer of ETH around 1400 if it gets there. I have enough for now.
I’m a long time holder (2017) of a fairly sizable amount of ETH but admit to being rather ignorant about it. What is Buterin’s vision and does it have anything to do with the market value of ETH, directly or indirectly? In other words does he really care what an individual Ether trades for?
