Over the last few weeks, it feels like everyone has written a longform piece about Ethereum and ETH the asset.

Fear not! I will not be adding my own here…

But its actually been great to see the rally of support and everyone writing up their own thesis. However, it’s been a lot to read 😂

I’ve tried to read most of them. And the more I read, the more I kept thinking: there is no way most people have time to keep up with all of this.

So I figured I’d aggregate a few of my favorites and summarize them. I took the most prominent bull pieces I could find, paired them with the main bear arguments, and tried to strip each side down to its core point.

What are the bulls actually saying?

What are the bears actually saying?

And if I had to compress both sides into their simplest form, what would the essence of each argument be?

This is my attempt to synthesize the whole debate. I won’t get every nuance of each argument, but hopefully capture what each person is ultimately trying to say.

First, I’ll summarize the bull case. Then I’ll summarize the bear case. Then I’ll even summarize the summaries.

Onward.

OK I chose 4 pieces for the bulls:

Joseph Chalom - Ethereum Going Back on Offense (full writeup)

Joseph’s case is the institutional adoption argument. He says people are too focused on EF drama, ETH price action, and short-term sentiment, while missing the larger fact that Ethereum has already become the trusted settlement layer for stablecoins, RWAs, DeFi, and high-value onchain activity. His most important point is that institutions do not want to leave one proprietary system just to enter another, so Ethereum’s decentralization and credible neutrality are not weaknesses, they are the reason it can win. In his framing, ETH benefits because there is no Ethereum without ETH, and the asset is inseparable from the network’s role as future financial infrastructure.

Tom Dunleavy - Why Ethereum is materially mispriced, my fair value, and the framework people keep missing (full writeup)

Tom’s core argument is that Ethereum is being valued with the wrong mental model. Bears are looking at falling fees and concluding ETH has poor value capture, but Tom argues fees are friction, not the point. In his framework, Ethereum is a vault holding stablecoins, RWAs, L2 assets, DeFi, and onchain capital, while ETH is the lock that secures it. If Ethereum is going to secure hundreds of billions, and eventually trillions, of financial value, then ETH itself needs to be worth far more because the system’s security is denominated in ETH.

Etherealize - The Path to $250,000 ETH: Ethereum and the Era of Productive Money (full writeup)

Etherealize frames ETH as a new category of money: productive money. Gold and Bitcoin can be scarce, but they are mostly inert. ETH is different because it can be held as a bearer-style asset, used as collateral, burned through activity, and staked to earn protocol-native yield without traditional credit risk. The argument is that ETH is not just another tech token or gas asset, but a monetary asset that can compound while also serving as the reserve collateral for onchain finance.

We also did a full podcast on this here:

Adriano Feria - Incumbency Is Not Superiority: A structural audit of the monetary properties of Bitcoin and Ethereum. (full writeup)

Adriano’s piece argues that Bitcoin’s superiority is mostly treated as a settled truth, when it should be audited more seriously. His claim is that Bitcoin’s biggest advantage is incumbency: brand, liquidity, and first-mover status, not necessarily better monetary design. Ethereum, in his view, has the stronger structural mechanics: a more sustainable security model, native yield, adaptive issuance, broader utility, and a better path to becoming the base layer for internet finance. The punchline is not that Bitcoin disappears, but that ETH may be the better engineered monetary asset while BTC remains the incumbent crypto money.

I primarily just went of David’s argument for the bear side:

David Hoffman - Why I Sold My ETH (full writeup)

The bear case is not really that Ethereum dies. It is that Ethereum can succeed while ETH under-captures the value of that success. David Hoffman’s core argument is that the “ETH is money” thesis did not fully fail, but it also did not become the dominant global monetary Schelling point many ETH bulls hoped for. Ethereum chose the hardest path: decentralized governance, L2 scaling, low fees, open-source infrastructure, and minimal extraction. That may make Ethereum incredibly useful, but it also means much of the value can accrue to apps, L2s, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and other ecosystems rather than ETH itself. The softer skeptical argument adds that decentralization and credible neutrality sound like powerful institutional advantages, but they are not automatic trump cards. Solana and other alt L1s are also gaining institutional traction by making different trade-offs around speed, cost, UX, and integration, so Ethereum still has to prove that institutions will value neutrality enough to outweigh cheaper and faster alternatives.

OK here’s my attempt to take the bull side and the bear side and boil them down into one sentence each:

Bull:

Bear:

Also, here’s a few other opinions I found online from Biteye:

Thanks for reading!

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