The more time passes, the more I believe crypto natives have completely lost the plot on ETH and that’s it’s becoming impossible to replicate the product that Ethereum has built. At this point, no other ecosystem is even attempting to create a WWIII-resistant, globally shared settlement system. And as we’ve come to understand, you can’t realistically do so anymore. The unopinionated, general-purpose GTM strategy that made Ethereum possible is now dead on arrival in today’s highly competitive and heavily financialized environment. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum emerged from a unique set of social, economic, and technological conditions that no longer exist — it is now nearly impossible for new entrants to build anything that competes with Ethereum in terms of legitimacy. I used to wonder how much any of this would matter to institutions. It still might be too early to call, and we’re already seeing attempts from Stripe and various Wall Street consortiums to roll up their own settlement infrastructure. Still, both the data and the anecdotal evidence indicate that institutions are choosing Ethereum more than anything else, for its reliability, neutrality, and ability to minimize long-term counterparty risk. In this sense it’s not unlike why institutions choose Bitcoin. Bitcoin provides the same guarantees to everyone regardless if they’re a billionaire in New York, dissident in North Korea, or the Central Bank of China. And the thing is, it’s not just that Ethereum has a special origin story or that it has unique properties. Its network effects are compounding in ways that may ultimately be insurmountable. The more assets that get tokenized, the more integrations that default to Ethereum as the safest settlement layer, the more high-performance rollups like Base and Lighter that choose to anchor to Ethereum’s security hub, the more nodes that get spun up, and the more developers that onboard into the EVM — the more I believe Vitalik was right about the rollup-centric roadmap, and the more obvious it becomes that Ethereum’s moat is widening, not shrinking. The cherry on top is it seems like the Ethereum Foundation, and community by extension, has finally got its shit together for the first time in a while. For the past two years I thought Ethereum was struggling, but that the “game” was still its to lose. There’s still a long road ahead and success is not guaranteed. But I now think they’re righting the ship, and the outlook is the most promising it’s been in a long time.