The ETH Faith Crisis: Why Ethereum Wins While Holders Lose

For most of the last decade, David Hoffman was among the loudest voices making the case for $ETH. As co-founder of Bankless, arguably the most influential Ethereum media property in the world, his bullishness on the network's native asset was not just a personal position. It was a professional identity. Last week, Hoffman sold it all. In an essay cross-published on Bankless and X, entitled "Why I Sold My $ETH," Hoffman was careful to frame the decision not as a bearish call but as a conclusion. "The $ETH is Money thesis didn't fail," he wrote. "It played out. Ethereum got the $ETH price it deserves, and I don't see $ETH being rerated as an asset, higher or lower." The essay landed in a community already fraying at the edges. And the debate it sparked cuts to the core of a question Ethereum has been circling for years: can a network win while its native token loses?

Hoffman's argument is architectural. Ethereum, he contends, was designed to maximize value for the applications, layer-2 networks, and stablecoin protocols built on top of it, not for $ETH holders. "Ethereum is a Giver, not a Taker," he wrote. "It supplies L2s with the world's most secure blockspace, at cost. It tokenizes the assets of the entire world, at cost. It secures billions of dollars in DeFi, at cost. Ethereum takes no markup for anything it does." The consequence, he argues, is that Ethereum's success as infrastructure may be entrenching other forms of money rather than $ETH itself. He points to stablecoins as Exhibit A. Ethereum hosted $3 billion in stablecoins in 2020. As of his writing, that figure stands at $163 billion, a 54-fold increase. The overwhelming majority of that value is denominated in dollars, not $ETH. "The utility Ethereum provides is helping increase the monetary network of whatever is money," Hoffman wrote, noting that the U.S. government now views Ethereum's stablecoin infrastructure as a tool for extending dollar hegemony. "Architecturally, $ETH is not prioritized in Ethereum, and this is a feature, not a bug," he added. "$ETH becomes money only if Ethereum wins a fight it architecturally declines to fight."

Not everyone accepts that the network and the token are so cleanly separable. Joseph Chalom, CEO of SharpLink, the largest Ethereum treasury company, and a former BlackRock digital assets executive who spent two decades in fintech and institutional strategy, offered a competing read on X this week. "There is no Ethereum without $ETH," Chalom wrote. "The asset and the network are inseparable." Chalom argued that today's Ethereum critics are repeating the mistake made by Amazon skeptics in the early 2000s: fixating on short-term metrics while missing a foundational infrastructure build. "The TAM is not crypto trading," he wrote. "It is the entire global financial system. $ETH's intrinsic value is tied to the expansion of the network." SharpLink has staked billions in $ETH and recently announced a $125 million DeFi yield fund alongside Galaxy Digital. Chalom framed his firm's posture as a direct answer to the capitulation narrative. "In nearly every market cycle, the moments when retail capitulates and sentiment is lowest are when disciplined capital steps into the opportunity," he wrote.

The debate is unfolding against a broader backdrop of uncertainty at the Ethereum Foundation. Multiple senior executives have departed the organization recently with minimal explanation. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued on X that the departures reflect strategy rather than dysfunction. "People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital," he wrote. On the question of personal conviction, he added that nearly 90% of his net worth remains in $ETH. Dankrad Feist, a former EF researcher, argued on X that the problem is structural. The EF continues to rely on a grants-based model that struggles to retain talent in a market where competing for engineers means competing with protocols that pay in token millions. The irony isn't lost on observers: Ethereum built the infrastructure for billion-dollar token economies, yet its own organization still operates like a modestly funded academic lab. Whether that changes may determine whether the network's success translates into anything for the people who actually own the asset.