What is Ethereum?

Ethereum is a blockchain network that produces ETH, its native asset, and supports smart contracts and decentralized applications. The material tracks its security model, transaction throughput, staking economics, and role as a financial asset, alongside recent concerns about execution and neutrality, and developments in layer-2 scaling and privacy.

• May 2026 - Ryan Sean Adams said there is an execution crisis in Ethereum.
• Jun 2026 - Ryan Sean Adams said there is no second best neutral chain; no other chain has a shot at being the neutral base layer.
• Jun 2026 - Ryan Sean Adams said Ethereum could achieve up to 4x scaling throughput.
• Jun 2026 - Vitalik Buterin said he personally favors a soft lean and done approach to Ethereum once the straw map is completed.
• Jul 2026 - Ryan Sean Adams said that a project’s absence from Ethereum is notable because block times are slow, preventing market makers from compliantly quoting prices.
• Jul 2026 - David Hoffman said Ethereum is an application-specific chain where the application is Ether.
• Jul 2026 - David Hoffman said he disagrees with the view that ETH needs to be a discounted cash flow asset because fees will never be a thing.
• Jul 2026 - David Hoffman said Ethereum gets 0.15% for data availability.
• Jul 2026 - Ryan Sean Adams said Ethereum should adopt its largest roll-ups in the sense that a critical bug in Arbitrum Base or Robin Hood chain should be treated as an Ethereum vulnerability and trigger an L1 fork just like an L1 bug would.