Ethereum: The Cryptocurrency That Refuses to Die (But Should)
As one navigates the treacherous waters of cryptocurrency, it’s not uncommon to stumble upon declarations of doom and gloom. But when Quinn Thompson, Chief Investment Officer of Lekker Capital, proclaimed Ethereum (ETH) to be “completely dead” as an investment, the crypto community took notice. And, one must admit, a certain morbid curiosity was piqued.
“Make no mistake, ETH as an investment is completely dead. A $225 billion market cap network that is seeing declines in transaction activity, user growth and fees/revenues. There is no investment case here. As a network with utility? Yes. As an investment? Absolutely not.”
He also shared a set of metrics to underscore Ethereum’s recent stagnation, including data on active addresses, transaction counts, and new address creation. It’s a bit like watching a patient slowly succumb to a terminal illness, with each passing day bringing a fresh wave of bad news.
The Great Ethereum Debate
“The #1 cause of this is greedy eth L2s siphoning value from the L1 and the social consensus that excess token creation was A-OK. Eth was buried in an avalanche of its own tokens. Died by its own hand.”
Thompson reinforced Carter’s criticism by suggesting that Ethereum’s community consensus had inadvertently favored token proliferation as a wealth-generation mechanism, ultimately undermining ETH’s investment narrative: “The social consensus among .eth’s in favor of excess tokens was because the creation of endless L2s, staking, restaking, DA, etc etc all enriched their pockets on the way up but no one wants to face the music now that the market is saying that was a mistake.”
However, this viewpoint was contested by Omid Malekan, professor at Columbia Business School and specialist in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology since 2019. Malekan underscored Layer 2s’ critical role in blockchain scalability and argued that any value-extraction by these secondary layers was not inherently detrimental to Ethereum’s foundational token economics: “L2s are the only viable way to scale any blockchain. Whether their tokens capture value or not is a separate question. But it can’t be that L2s ‘siphoned value from ETH’ yet didn’t capture value themselves. Security is not free.”
Malekan further challenged Thompson’s claim by questioning whether Ethereum could realistically become the first example in history of a widely adopted technological network whose utility failed to generate any meaningful financial return: “Is Ethereum going to be the first network ‘with utility’ in modern history where the network effects aren’t monetized? Can you provide any other examples of this happening?”
“There’s tons of network effects being monetized all over the place, just not enough to ETH to justify its current valuation. Do all the network effects of the oil network and usage of oil accrue to oil?”
However, the oil analogy drew skepticism from Scott Johnsson, General Partner at VB Capital, who critiqued Thompson’s comparison due to Ethereum’s unique tokenomics, particularly its deflationary token burning mechanics influenced directly by network usage:
“I think we’re talking past each other a bit. I don’t think it’s arguable that if ETH usage increases that it leads to more burn and less inflation (production). I’m specifically not making future predictions on that usage. In any event, your ultimate point is fine imo because the demand side is so sensitive to really any cost.”
At press time, ETH traded at $1,793.
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2025-03-31 11:44