The founder of the Cardano project, Charles Hoskinson, questioned the future of the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization, stating that Ethereum may not withstand competition over the next 10-15 years.

Hoskinson sees the main threat to Ethereum in the L2 solutions ecosystem, such as Arbitrum and Optimism. Instead of solving scalability issues, he believes these networks are siphoning value away from the main chain.

"Layer two solutions are more like parasites — they suck all the profit out of the main chain. Instead of unification, we see disunity," he noted.

Hoskinson also compared the situation with Ethereum to the decline of giants like Myspace and Blackberry, which failed to adapt to new realities.

He doubts that the current governance structure of Ethereum will be able to handle the growing tension and noted that co-founder Vitalik Buterin will find it "increasingly difficult to keep a lot of people together by sheer willpower."

Additionally, crypto analyst Alessandro Ottaviani referred to Ethereum as a "falling knife" in the crypto market, while Santiment linked the decline in network fees to a decrease in the number of users conducting transactions.