cookz

The chart unfortunately paints a much different picture than the caption. That chart depicts a steady decline in onchain activity ($ wise) since 2021, supported by alt metrics like google trends which also show a decline in crypto interest over that same timeframe. If you look closely, Ethereum’s share of activity was in a down trend until 2025, but since then has stabilized and is now regaining dominance, albeit at snail’s pace. Hyperliquid fees shouldn’t be conflated with general purpose onchain activity as all of their revenue comes from perps trading. I bet if we had better insight into bybit, or binance, or bitmex, or any other CEX we’d see that it’s their revenue being cannibalized rather general purposes block space. Look I get it. ETH has been underperforming BTC quite a bit. I don’t like it. You don’t like it. Vitalik doesn’t like it. The EF doesn’t like it. I think the reason Ethereum is the target of these hit pieces is that it has a large and active community and poking at it sparks engagement. (The very same chart illustrates an even steeper decline in Solana market share over a shorter timeframe, but makes no mention of that) I also think VCs and funds are incentivized to poke at Ethereum because they see blockchains as inevitable, and think that there’s enormous upside in capturing capital rotations out of ETH and into their bags. This gives even more fuel for hit pieces in Eth. What they miss is that Ethereum development has not been losing market share. Alt L1s are not a new phenomenon, they’ve been around since before ETH. And even in 2021, there was no shortage of them. What these VCs and hit pieces don’t understand by spinning narratives is that activity as a whole has been declining. Painting Eth in a negative light is just a red herring for the fact that most of the industry is struggling. Bitcoin is seeing supply centralization and mining consolidation in a way that is completely unprecedented in its short history. Solana engineered a social narrative that lead to massive amounts of extraction from retail to its own and the rest of the industry’s detriment. Binance/BNB has and continues to engage in some of the most manipulative and corrupt practices in crypto, and these hit pieces actually credit them for their wash-trading sourced revenue! Tron is widely known to have onchain activity of questionable provenance, and largely serves as a sandbox for Tether. Hyperliquid is the new shiny thing that’s making holders money so all its sins are washed, but everyone is forgetting that the chain is literally closed source. I’m not telling you to buy ETH. You can invest how you want. But ETH’s price action is probably the strongest signal of genuine crypto interest. Its decline means that interest in crypto more broadly is in decline. The chart below illustrates that fact more than anything else. And spinning anti-ETH narratives is just a projection that crypto simply isn’t capturing mind share or capital flows the way it did. “Ethereum losing to competitors” isn’t the story here. The story is that capital is largely expensive as result of high glob interest rates, and what liquidity is available is being funnelled into Sam Altman’s and Dario’s quests to build god. But there are exceptions. It’s not all doom and gloom. Prediction markets are an exception. Equity/commodity perps are an exception. And amazingly, in a massive breath of fresh air, onchain privacy solutions are an exception. Interestingly, the top prediction market, the top perp-DEX, and almost all of the privacy solutions are either built on Ethereum, built adjacent to Ethereum, or adopt Ethereum tech. But we don’t see that in any of the headlines do we?