Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
“Save ETH!”
“Can ETH really hit the bottom?”
Various signs indicate that it might be time to buy a little ETH, but why do I have no desire to purchase?”
As the market enters a temporary period of stabilization, many crypto players are once again voicing the above concerns, unable to hide their disappointment with ETH's price and their expectations for its recovery. Coupled with a K-line comparison chart seen earlier and a recent article titled “In Continuous Decline, ETH Needs a New Narrative”, perhaps we have reached a “market calm period” where we need to seek new paths for ETH and the Ethereum ecosystem.
ETH Enters the “Nokia Moment”: Potential Downward Trend Ahead
Let’s start with a chart.
Recently, Solana ecosystem loyal crypto KOL @CryptoCurb posted a tweet comparing the K-line chart of Nokia's stock price with that of ETH. From the price trends, the two can be said to be… identical.
Nokia VS ETH
Perhaps this comparison is a bit far-fetched, but if we look at the K-line charts separately, they still exhibit certain similarities—
First, from the periodic nodes perspective, Nokia's stock price peak occurred around May 2000, with a secondary peak around November 2007; ETH's price peak occurred around November 2021, with a secondary peak expected around March 2024 and December 2024 after Trump's election.
Secondly, from the historical hindsight perspective, Nokia's peak occurred during the internet bubble, on the eve of the internet explosion; the secondary peak occurred on the eve of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, just before Apple released the iPhone. In comparison, ETH's peak occurred during the bull market of 2021, when Ethereum experienced the ecological booms of DeFi, GameFi, and NFTs, with token consumption far exceeding token supply, and successfully transitioned from a POW to a POS mechanism in September 2022; ETH's secondary peak benefited from the policy dividends after the approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs in January 2024 and the “Trump effect” that stimulated the bull market after Trump's election.
Finally, from the historical development stage perspective, Nokia ultimately failed to iterate to smartphones due to clinging to outdated “feature phones,” missing the wave of hardware devices and being swept into the dustbin of history, while Apple's iPhone and other product matrices built on the IOS ecosystem successfully placed Apple in the trillion-dollar market cap club, becoming “the world's most valuable publicly traded company.” ETH's current state bears a striking resemblance to Nokia after 2007: lacking new products, no network protocols leading the next generation of internet development, and no unique ecological differentiation, instead suffering from the siphoning of L2 and fragmented liquidity.
With the vision of a “world computer,” Ethereum is now as rigid and outdated as the former Windows 98 system.
When ETH Falls into a Narrative Deadlock: Where is the Next Breakthrough?
Currently, with the continuous decline in price and the ongoing drop in the ETH/BTC exchange rate, the narrative of ETH as a value storage function, akin to Bitcoin's “digital silver,” has been phase-wise disproven; its positioning as an “ultrasound currency” is also trapped in a dead end due to the scarcity of consumption scenarios, fragmented liquidity from L2 networks, and inflation impacts post-POS mechanism.
Consequently, the next narratives that ETH and the Ethereum ecosystem are expected to rely on mainly focus on two directions:
First is the RWA network. From metrics such as market cap, TVL, developer count, and user count, the Ethereum ecosystem remains the backbone of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, leading countless crypto users to view Ethereum as the “essential bridge” for RWA assets to enter the crypto space.
Second is the PayFi chain. In terms of ecological security, scalability, and the circulation of stablecoins and accumulated assets, the Ethereum ecosystem is considered the main battleground for the PayFi chain. Although the mainnet gas costs were high during the bull market, the emergence of L2 and the decline in ecological activity have significantly reduced payment costs, leading many to believe that the Ethereum ecosystem is still a necessary component of the PayFi track.
However, currently, neither of these two narratives can serve as the “uniqueness narrative” for ETH and the Ethereum ecosystem.
In other words, what the EVM system can do, the Solana ecosystem can also do, and even due to lower operating costs and high-performance networks, Solana may perform better in the RWA and PayFi tracks. This can be glimpsed from the rapid development of Huma.Finance after expanding into the Solana ecosystem. For more details, see “Is Huma, the ‘PayFi Rising Star,’ Really P2P?”.
Therefore, what can truly open up the situation for ETH and the Ethereum ecosystem is not the conventional asset bridge or payment chain.
To address ETH's current underperformance in market price, the fundamental issues lie in two points:
Increase consumption, reduce supply.
Enhance scalability, weaken fragmentation.
The former requires more innovative protocol applications to reduce sell-off volumes; the latter needs to eliminate L2 ghost chains that disperse liquidity and parasitize the Ethereum mainnet ecosystem.
How Can ETH Grow into the IOS Ecosystem? Currently Unlikely, but Development Ideas Can Be Borrowed
So the next question is: Can the Ethereum ecosystem grow into the robustly moated Apple IOS ecosystem of today?
Currently, this path seems difficult to establish, as the decentralized nature of blockchain networks is inherently at odds with the centralized review mechanism of the IOS ecosystem's AppStore; however, the Ethereum ecosystem may become a “decentralized security solution provider.”
Looking back at how Apple managed to emerge from its operational quagmire, the closed and smooth ecosystem of the IOS system provided a foundation for development; the AppStore and the gradually flourishing application ecosystem based on it were key. For the current ETH and Ethereum ecosystem, promoting the emergence of more applications to incubate and nurture the birth of more innovative products and protocols may open up a different development path for the entire ecosystem.
Specifically, the next wave of innovation in the Ethereum ecosystem may emerge in the following three areas:
1. On-chain AI automated trading. In an era where AI is developing rapidly, on-chain AI automated trading will gradually land in reality at a speed far beyond imagination, achieving the effect of “what you see is what you get, what you get is what you trade.”
2. Digital asset management application treasure. As various physical assets can be flexibly numbered and digitized through blockchain networks, the Ethereum network may grow into an “on-demand application treasure” for global economic participants to trade. In this regard, IP and content creator economies will be important components.
3. Neutral yield product distribution center. Institutional investors and certain professional investors will seek new neutral yield products on-chain, such as stablecoin derivatives yield products.
Of course, the above is merely one perspective; the specific development will require joint verification by technology and ecology.
Recommended Reading
dacc.eth Emerges, Is Decentralized Accelerationism the Future?
Ethereum Falls into “Midlife Crisis,” Analyzing Development Performance from Data Dimensions
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
