Do you still believe in $ETH ? Does $ETH still have a future?
- Compared to the historical high of the last bull market, ETH's price is still down about 64%.
- In the past year, ETH has depreciated 80% relative to Solana and 60% relative to BTC.
If you bought ETH during the last major correction, as of today, you’ve only made about 15%; meanwhile, holding BTC during the same period has yielded as much as 500%.
Ethereum currently has three adjustment plans, let’s briefly explain:
1. Vitalik's “Radical VM” proposal
The core of Ethereum is the EVM. Vitalik suggests replacing the EVM with RISC-V, what does that mean?
The Ethereum EVM can be viewed as an old gasoline engine. It runs, but it's complex and has high fuel consumption. RISC-V is more like a streamlined engine, fuel-efficient, with a simple structure that is easy to maintain.
What does this mean for retail investors?
If the upgrade is successful, performing any operation on-chain (transfers, DeFi, minting NFTs) will be cheaper and faster, and the upgrade speed of Ethereum will also be faster.
2. Expand and speed up the mainnet (L1)
The earlier scalability roadmap emphasized “handing users over to Layer 2 (L2),” leading to L2s creating their own tokens, while ETH did not directly capture value. The EF has recognized that a strong mainnet (L1) remains fundamental, thus proposing:
First, increase the gas limit by 3-10 times in the next 1-2 years;
Then use zero-knowledge technology to long-term increase throughput by a thousand times;
Reduce confirmation time from several seconds to about 0.1 seconds.
3. Enhance L2 interoperability
Currently, each L2 operates like an independent small country: bridging is troublesome, fees vary, and contracts are not interoperable. The foundation has formed a dedicated team to make users and developers feel like they are still on the same chain.
Three months ago, the EF established a dedicated working group to promote two parallel paths:
1. User-level interoperability: making users feel “the entire Ethereum is still the same chain.”
2. Developer-level composability: allowing developers to call mainnet and other rollup contracts from any rollup, creating a single-chain experience.
However, these solutions cannot resolve a core consensus for ETH: Ethereum's market capitalization is too high, leading most speculators, both inside and outside the circle, to turn to cheaper L1 options with greater upside potential.
