So I've gotten a bunch of counter-arguments here that I think have made me dramatically more bearish about ETH.
The market seems to agree: ETH hit an ATH in the 4000s in 2021, recovered only to that same level in 2025, but has fallen back down and is not recovering.
BTC got into the low 60k range in 2021, then hit the 120s in 2025, and now sits at roughly $77k, well above the 2021 ATH, and vastly outperforming ETH over that timeframe.
Why?
If you don't think there will be a future link to ETH collecting fees, you are essentially saying ETH will have value because people want to own it, and they want to own it because it has value.
This is a fundamentally circular argument. The idea that they are valued by "the economies they enable" is simply not going to be true over the long run; power is valued by the cost of generation and relative other uses of capital, not by the size of the "economy it enables", otherwise electricity would be the most expensive thing in the world.
I propose most of ETH's current value is from people who believed the network will grow to become a significant part of the financial future and that ETH itself will somehow be able to collect fees, rents, or other value in the form of accrual to ETH in that world.
If that's not true, then it's an open question why the token has much value at all? It probably shouldn't! If it's just some sort of very low cost fee thing without clear value accrual, it should be valued like electricity: pure marginal supply and demand, which also means ETH needs to definitely drive way, way, way more activity and way, way, way more consumer adoption, so the recent EF proposals are a negative.
In the case of BTC, it's clear that value comes from a psychological belief in the monetary premium, though also worth noting that the only asset that has sustained that belief over time in the history of man is gold. BTC has not been trading well as a chaos hedge, and some are starting to revisit this thesis (see
@mcuban) and I would also take that as signal.
Put differently: if your value thesis for crypto is that it's going to re-write the fundamental laws of economics and investing, I'm going to bet on those and not the price of the token.
ETH isn’t valued by fees, neither is BTC.
Both are valued by the size of the economies they enable. Currently BTC is more widely used, Iran wanted it as a toll, but Ethereum has the more diverse onchain economy.