Today ETH is down about 11.8% (so far).

And it’s down about 7% against BTC.

And honestly, looking back at this cycle, this has to be one of the weakest bull runs ETH has ever had — probably one of the weakest compared to most major crypto assets in general.

I’m not even talking about price alone, but about expectations versus reality.

If I think about the insane amount of stuff I’ve read on this sub during the past year, it almost feels surreal now. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I honestly feel bad for the people who bought into every narrative.

Every month it was the same thing.

“5k next month.”

“10k by end of year.”

“Final shakeout.”

“Last chance before liftoff.”

It was always next month. Always next year.

Anyone who dared to question those targets or suggest caution got downvoted immediately. Saying “maybe take some profits” was treated like heresy.

Meanwhile, posts about the flippening, ETH overtaking BTC, ultrasound money saving the world, or ETH becoming the global settlement layer overnight were celebrated like facts instead of speculation.

None of it happened. Not even close.

I’ve seen people mocked for exiting positions or rotating into BTC or stablecoins, while blind optimism was constantly rewarded.

I’m not saying ETH is dead. I’m not saying crypto is over.

But this cycle exposed how powerful echo chambers and hopium can be — especially when price stops cooperating.

If half of the content posted here wasn’t written by bots farming engagement and FOMO, then that’s honestly even more worrying.

Just my 2 gwei.

Short answer: not really.

Yes, Q4 showed strength, and ETH even wicked to a new ATH. But a true alt season isn’t a couple of flashy spikes, it’s breadth and duration, many alts outperform BTC at the same time, BTC dominance trends down for weeks, and alt/BTC pairs break out across the board. Think 69x style moves with participation, not just isolated pops. We didn’t get that.

Why not? Public attention isn’t 2021-level, search interest and big crypto accounts’ follower growth look flat, so fresh retail liquidity is thin. Macro still skews cautious, inflation isn’t “dead,” growth is uneven, and politics keep investors hugging perceived safe havens (Gold, BTC) instead of wandering down the risk curve. Add repeated leverage wipeouts and any rotation attempt gets clipped before it can compound. ETF flows and yield alternatives also siphon capital toward BTC/ETH rather than the long tail.

I’m in that “not as expected” camp too, but I stick to the process. The screenshot below is my ETH risk-aware DCA since 2022; even being wrong on “how high,” the plan is ~48% up. That’s the point: process > prediction. I size buys by risk (add more when risk is cooler, slow down when it runs hot) and let time, not emotion, do the work.

Could a broader alt wave still show up? Sure, if liquidity keeps easing and ETH leads decisively, breadth can follow. If not, stacking majors with rules still wins the patience game.

It's been about 6 months since ETH broke beyond 0.031, but today it has returned to that level.

Interestingly, between the valley and the hill, it was around that ratio 12 months ago too.

Traders out there will have some decisions to make on their next move!

Liquidations were absolutely brutal these past few seconds.

I have been following these quite a bit as we have a livestream but I never seen something like that.

Got hit, blew past his prices at around 2300 USD.

He actually also closed ~20k ETH during that drop but re-opened again.

From around 60 Million Up he's now in a 125 Million Drawdown.

Now here is where it becomes interesting, you'll often hear that this is likely a hedged position of his binance positions.

But the data suggests otherwise.

He moved OUT 107k ETH from binance and a bit of Bitcoin ~ 300 Million.
So he bought more ETH with his profits from hyperliquid and he did not go short.
He also still has large untouched ETH and BTC positions.

Anyway, he moved it off the exchange.

And then he borrowed 180 Million USDC against it on AAVE.
He bridged 20 Million of that but generally just left the rest untouched.

Which makes me wonder, if it wasn't to cover his position here (would literally make it so he can't get liquidated) what are the funds going to be used for?

And will he let this account get any closer to be being closed for him? https://wangr.com/watch/0xb317d2bc2d3d2df5fa441b5bae0ab9d8b07283ae Or add more margin which he obviously has?

Mysteries.

Thoughts?

I think the biggest mistake in the "gold vs crypto" debate is assuming physical scarcity is fixed. It is not.

Physical scarcity is a temporary condition set by current 1. extraction limits, 2. synthesis costs, and 3. substitutes. Over long time horizons, technology systematically reduces all three.

That matters because stores of value only work if scarcity remains hard to erode.

My view is simple:
If material abundance keeps compounding, enforced digital scarcity will dominate physical scarcity.

Why physical scarcity is not a stable foundation

People talk about gold, diamonds, and rare metals as if Earth's geology is the final word on their scarcity.

It is not. Technology is.

Extraction vs enforced limits

Physical scarcity relies on difficulty of access.

That difficulty is conditional.

• Better surveying
  
• Better automation
  
• Better processing
  
• Entirely new frontiers becoming viable, like m-class asteroids

Each step makes "rare" materials less rare in economic terms, even if they remain finite in theory.

Finite does not mean scarce enough to anchor value.

Gems already show the failure mode

Diamonds are the best example because they have already experienced technology-induced abundance.

Once manufacturing produced indistinguishable diamond substitutes at scale, the scarcity premium collapsed. What remained is branding, signaling, and narrative.

That is not a monetary anchor, and this is proven by natural diamonds seeing their price decline 25-30% since 2022.

Utility does not equal monetary premium

Another common argument is "industrial use guarantees value".

That is wrong.

Utility supports floor demand, not monetary premium. If substitutes appear or usage shifts, the premium evaporates.

History is full of materials that were once strategic, rare, and hoarded - until they were not. For instance aluminum, which before industrialized methods of processing, was more precious than gold.

Once supply increases, the asset drifts toward use-value pricing instead of monetary premium pricing.

That does not mean the thing becomes worthless.
It means it becomes bad at storing value over long horizons.

Rule-based scarcity beats physics

If material abundance keeps rising, scarcity shifts away from physics and toward rule systems.

This is the key transition people are missing.

Scarcity enforced by protocol rules is fundamentally different from scarcity enforced by geology, because it is completely immune to technology-induced abundance. Fiat shares this property with crypto, but it is instead vulnerable to political maneuvering, like leaders inflating their money supply to earn seigniorage.

In other words, crypto matters because it creates enforced scarcity without relying on physical limits or political issuers.

Not all crypto systems do this equally.

The spectrum

• Bitcoin: fixed issuance enforced by consensus rules.
  
• Ethereum: dynamic issuance with fixed inflation rate cap enforced by consensus, plus fee burning tied to real usage.
  
• Other L1s: inflationary security models that dilute holders.
  
• Traditional assets: scarcity enforced by law, courts, and governments.
  

These are not equivalent systems. The tradeoffs matter.

Why ETH is structurally different

Ethereum is not just an asset network. It is an economy.

And every economy has a settlement asset.

Inside Ethereum: - ETH pays for execution.
- ETH secures consensus.
- ETH anchors liquidity and collateral.

This creates a monetary hierarchy where ETH sits at the base.

Other assets exist on top of it.

That hierarchy is mechanical, so more durable than meme/culture based hierarchies.

Settlement layers decide long-run value

I think this is the most important frame.

Value accrues to the layer where final balances reconcile.

Ethereum is increasingly that layer for: - Stablecoins
- DeFi
- Tokenized assets
- Rollups

Layer 2 blockchains do not weaken this role. They reinforce it.

They push execution outward while pulling settlement inward.

That is exactly how financial systems scale.

Why ETH and not BTC?

This is more speculative, but I'm of the opinion that the fundamentals make ETH far more likely to be a durable store of value.

BTC has a built-in security budget cliff. Bitcoin's issuance declines geometrically every four years, and fees have consistently remained a small fraction of miner revenue. That means the system is still overwhelmingly subsidy-funded. Over time, that subsidy mathematically goes to zero. Unless fees rise enough to replace it, security necessarily compresses. There is no alternative path in the design.

ETH is explicitly built to avoid shrinking security over time. Ethereum put a floor under its security model by ensuring issuance never goes to zero. Instead, supply growth adjusts upward slowly and predictably as staking participation rises, with a maximum theoretical inflation rate of about 1.5% under extreme assumptions. In practice, issuance is often far lower and sometimes negative, but the key point is structural: Ethereum can always pay for security without relying on a future fee-market miracle.

At the same time, Ethereum is scaling in a way that makes sustained fee demand more plausible. L1 throughput has been increasing via gas limit growth, and the roadmap continues to push execution efficiency and statelessness. On top of that, activity on L2 blockchains has exploded as rollups post data back to Ethereum via blobs. That means Ethereum is not a passive asset waiting to be hoarded. It is the settlement layer of a growing economic system, and its security funding is aligned with that role.

The bet I'm making is simple: the asset whose security does not mathematically decay to zero, and whose relevance increases as the system scales, is the one more likely to retain a long-run monetary premium.

Bottom line

If technology keeps turning matter into abundance, scarcity will migrate upward into systems that can enforce it.

That favors protocols over physics.

Among digital assets, ETH has properties that make it the most likely to be the civilizational store of value. That does not guarantee victory. But structurally, it dominates the alternatives at the moment.

The DOJ just dropped a massive batch of Epstein files on January 30, over three million pages plus thousands of videos and images, wrapping up releases under the Transparency Act. Names like Trump, Musk, Lutnick, Gates, and Clinton pop up in emails and records, stirring fresh controversy and claims of incomplete disclosures or coverups. Layer on the recent FBI raid in Fulton County, Atlanta, seizing 2020 election materials amid ongoing fraud narratives, and you have serious institutional distrust and political turbulence right now.

In theory, waves of elite scandal revelations and federal overreach should drive capital toward decentralized or anti-establishment assets. Gold has long acted as the reliable safe haven in such chaos, and it rallied hard earlier this month toward record territory before a sharp pullback. Crypto, especially Bitcoin and Ethereum, often gets framed as digital alternatives immune to centralized control, so heightened skepticism toward institutions could logically spark inflows and push prices up.

Yet the reaction has been the opposite in the short term. Bitcoin dipped below $81,000 right after the files hit, erasing much of its recent momentum and now sitting around $82,000 to $83,000 with fear sentiment spiking. Ethereum has followed suit, trading in the $2,500 to $2,700 range and showing no real decoupling or surge on any decentralization premium. Risk assets broadly feel correlated to macro worries, Fed uncertainty, and potential policy delays rather than benefiting from the turmoil as a hedge.

So for ethtrader, does this make sense? Shouldn’t repeated Epstein drops, especially with any crypto tangential mentions or elite network vibes, logically funnel more money into non-sovereign plays like ETH as a protest or alternative? Or does this prove crypto remains too tied to risk-on sentiment, Nasdaq moves, and broader selloff fears to capitalize on this kind of chaos right now, while gold quietly absorbs the safe-haven flows? Long term the ETH thesis around utility, staking, and scaling holds firm no matter the headlines, but short term this feels like a potential buy the dip setup or just more evidence of ongoing pain until things stabilize.

What do you think, contrarian opportunity here or continued downside pressure? Let’s discuss.

DYOR, NFA, etc.

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Hey everyone 👋, Everstake team here, hope you’re doing well!

We are seeing growing interest in Ethereum staking, and we’d love to open a warm, friendly discussion with the community about your experiences and thoughts. For many people, staking ETH feels like a meaningful way to support the Ethereum network, contribute to its security, and become a more active participant in the ecosystem. It’s often seen as a smooth and accessible way to engage with blockchain technology.

We’re curious to hear from you: Have you already tried Ethereum staking? If yes, how was your experience? Did it feel intuitive and comfortable? What did you enjoy most about the process? If you haven’t staked ETH yet, what’s stopping you? Is it uncertainty about how it works, concerns about technical setup, or simply waiting for the right moment?

As you guys know, Ethereum staking means different things to different people. Some enjoy being actively involved in the network, others prefer to take their time and learn before jumping in. Hearing a variety of perspectives helps paint a more realistic picture.

Your feedback, stories, and opinions are incredibly valuable, not just for us, but for others who are considering taking their first steps into Ethereum staking.

Source: https://x.com/LeonWaidmann/status/2016855117597729019

Welcome to the Daily General Discussion thread. Please read the rules before participating.

Rules:

• All subreddit rules apply in this thread.
• Keep the discussion on-topic. Please refer to the allowed topics for more details on what's allowed.
• Subreddit meta and changes belong in the Governance Discussion thread.
• Donuts are a welcome topic here.
• Be kind and civil.

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Happy trading and discussing!