Ethereum

Ethereum is the second-most-watched asset in the market and arguably the most misunderstood. Bitcoin's story is clean: digital gold, regulated wrapper, institutional adoption. Ethereum's story is messier because Ethereum is doing more than one thing at once — it is a settlement layer, a staking-yield-bearing asset, a programmable-money platform, and the host of the largest active developer community in the space.

What moves ETH? Three things, in order: spot ETF flows (smaller and more volatile than BTC's), the staking yield curve relative to risk-free rates, and L2 activity that translates into mainnet base-fee burn. The first is sentiment, the second is valuation, the third is fundamentals.

The L2 cannibalisation question is the central debate around Ethereum today. The bears say L2s extract value without paying for it; the bulls say L2 settlement onto mainnet eventually pays for itself once activity scales. We do not have a settled view, but we have data, and we publish it.

What you will find here

• Staking economics — validator queue, exit queue, real staking yield net of L1 issuance, MEV share. We track Lido, Rocket Pool, and the solo-staker share over time.
• Spot ETF flows — the ETHE/ETHA picture.
• Mainnet base-fee burn — the deflationary story.
• L2 settlement economics — how much L2s pay to settle on mainnet, post-Dencun and post-Pectra.
• Live profile + daily prediction — every ETH story links to /coins/ethereum/ and /predictions/ethereum/.

The ETH/BTC question

The most-asked question in our reader emails is "when does ETH/BTC turn?" Our honest answer: probably later than you think. The ratio moves with three things: relative ETF AUM growth, the perceived terminal value of staked ETH as a yield asset, and L2 fee recapture. What we would watch is the staking yield premium over the 10Y Treasury.

Three numbers we look at every week

• Net real staking yield — gross yield minus issuance dilution.
• L1 base-fee burn rate (annualised) — how much ETH is being destroyed per year.
• L2 settlement revenue paid to L1 — whether the rollup-centric roadmap accrues value to ETH.

Key projects in the ETH ecosystem

• Ethereum (ETH) — the asset itself.
• Lido — the largest liquid staking protocol.
• Rocket Pool — decentralised staking.
• Uniswap — the largest DEX.
• Maker / Sky — the longest-running DeFi credit primitive.

Related coverage

• Layer 2 — the rollup ecosystem that lives on top of Ethereum.
• DeFi — the largest single use case for ETH the platform.
• Bitcoin — the other asset every ETH thesis is implicitly compared against.
• Learn: What is Ethereum?

For methodology see /methodology/. Subscribe to the morning briefing.