For years, Ethereum maxis pushed the “ETH is money” narrative, arguing with Bitcoiners that ETH is the superior decentralized monetary asset, since it has lower inflation and more utility.
In my humble opinion, this is barking up the wrong tree and simply didn’t work. Bitcoin’s pure focus as a simple, decentralized, uncorruptible store of value is near impossible to out compete, when its founder is nowhere to be found, and it simply focuses on one thing: being good money. The ETHBTC chart showed how much this narrative failed.
Ethereum, on the other hand, has many living, active developers, regular protocol upgrades which often change issuance or economics, and many purposes beyond simply being a digital money.
If you are doing 10 things, you cannot outcompete someone doing one thing with every fiber of their being.
So, What is the value of ETH?
Just like every person and company should focus on what it does best, rather than trying to compete with others, ETH(ereum) should focus on what it is unique to itself: programmability.
ETH is Programmable Money
Unlike Bitcoin, which you can barely even send money efficiently with, you can do anything you can code with ETH. As an asset on a smart contract chain, you can do anything you can do with digital dollars, and much much more as well. DeFi is able to not just replicate traditional finance, but enables new primitives like flash loans, AMMs, novel options or interest rate derivates, money markets that also act as market makers, anc much much more.
You can do anything you can imagine with ETHereum.
What about Stablecoins?
Traditional finance is starting to recognize the potential of Etheruem as they and their clients pile in with stablecoins, seeking better yield, more efficient payment rails, and access to global clients.
These stablecoins benefit from much of the same programmability as ETH, what makes ETH special?
ETH is Programmable, Sovereign State Resistant Money
As stablecoins come on chain, the value of ETH actually increases. On a purely utilitarian level, ETH as gas becomes more useful, but on a monetary level, the protocol native asset of a decentralized smart contract chain is unfreezable, as fungible as physical cash, not arbitrarily issuable like fiat money.
ETH is not just programmable like stablecoins, and it’s not just Sovereign State resistant like Bitcoin; it is both.
It is the sovereign state resistant money that you own, that you can use any way you want, that DeFi treasuries and protocols can hold with regulatory resistance, that users can lend or borrow against without worry of being frozen.
ETH is the most powerful money we have today, that is growing every block as more assets flow on chain.