Ethereum Backers Respond to Critics: ‘Markets Will Catch Up’

TORONTO — Ethereum simply accomplished its most important improve in additional than a 12 months, however the milestone comes after a turbulent stretch for the blockchain. The worth of ether (ETH) has declined, builders have migrated to rival platforms, and the Ethereum Foundation — a nonprofit steward of the challenge — has confronted criticism for an absence of coordination and imaginative and prescient.

Speaking on a panel at CoinDesk’s Consensus convention in Toronto, Paul Brody — world blockchain chief at EY and chairman of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance — and Josh Stark of the Ethereum Foundation, supplied a extra optimistic view of the highway forward.

There are two issues the group is on the lookout for, Stark mentioned. First, “the ecosystem needs stronger leadership … Stronger leadership on the roadmap, on executing that roadmap, and really help coordinating the ecosystem to tackle the big challenges.”

Second, the community wants higher messaging. “Ethereum’s fundamentals are incredibly strong, but few people are standing up to tell the story of that ecosystem and to boost the incredible stuff being built,” Stark mentioned.

For all its current struggles, Stark and Brody maintained that Ethereum stays essentially the most revolutionary and forward-focused challenge in crypto.

Brody urged that considerations concerning the basis’s management are notably overblown, giving the Ethereum Foundation’s former govt director, Aya Miyaguchi, prime marks for her tenure, which started in 2018 and ended this 12 months.

“Ethereum is a proof-of-stake chain with more than 120 layer-2 networks,” mentioned Broday. Network capability, he added, is close to “300 and 450 million transactions a day.” Additionally, “transaction fees at the L2 level — they average under one penny per transaction for the last three months,” mentioned Brody. “If I step back and look at [Miyaguchi’s] tenure very objectively in terms of the results, I would say A plus.”

Miyaguchi transitioned to Ethereum Foundation president in March 2025, installing Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak as its new co-executive directors — part of a leadership restructuring aimed at enhancing the foundation’s strategic focus.

Some critics have argued Ethereum’s roadmap has relied too heavily on layer-2 rollups — independent blockchains that process transactions cheaply and quickly before “settling” their history on Ethereum’s main chain. Brody defended the network’s rollup-centric roadmap: “I’m delighted,” he said.

While layer-2s like Optimism, Arbitrum and Coinbase’s Base network have lowered users’ fees — generally considered the main headwind to wider network adoption — skeptics say they also introduce new safety dangers and fragmentation hurdles that threaten Ethereum’s elementary worth proposition.

“Ethereum is being Ethereum,” Brody mentioned. “Which is, identify a problem, fix it, and move on to the next problem. In terms of the biggest problem that we were dealing with over the last few years, it was scale, right? Going from being able to do a million transactions a day to 450 million network capacity is great.”

“All ecosystems are going to end up with something like an L2 roadmap with modularity and specialization,” Stark added. “We’re just the ones that have gone furthest down this path, and we found the twists and the turns and the challenges on that road, and we’re dealing with them.”

Ether (ETH), the community’s native token, has lengthy been thought-about a blue-chip crypto asset. But in current months, it has underperformed relative to some rivals. Network tokens are sometimes considered as a proxy for an ecosystem’s total well being.

Bitcoin, Stark famous, has efficiently positioned itself as a dependable retailer of worth, serving to it climate the market extra favorably than Ethereum. “Ethereum has a more complicated narrative,” he mentioned.

Still, Stark expressed confidence that the market would ultimately replicate Ethereum’s deeper worth.

“The world’s not going to stop learning about these technologies and these systems,” he mentioned. “The world is going to have an appetite for a slightly more complicated, but just as real value proposition. And I think we’re starting to see that now. So I think that markets eventually price value. And I think that Ethereum is the most important project in crypto and always has been.”