Ethereum’s Existential Crisis: Built to Fail?

Gas fees choke innovation. Layer-2 bandaids peel off. The Merge? More like a slow-motion car crash.

Why Vitalik’s masterpiece might be its own worst enemy—and how Wall Street vultures are already circling.

Yes, we’ve scaled via rollups, but one of the few remaining use cases for Ethereum is settlement and DA. If the very few applications that actually accrue any source of value back to Ethereum are forced to leave due to constrained DA capacity, what source of value will Ethereum have left? 

There is a recursive theme that’s inherent in the value cycle of a successful protocol layer which hinges on the apps. In fact, this was one of the many ideas that gave merit to the fat protocol thesis – value would Flow upstream from apps to the protocol layer.

But a chain is only as valuable as the sum total of the apps built on it.