Preface

2025 ranks among the most eventful years the crypto market has witnessed to date. A summer bull run — one that even US President Donald Trump publicly praised — was followed by the events of 10 October, the largest liquidation day in recorded history. On that day, more than nineteen billion dollars in leveraged positions were liquidated, and more than one and a half million accounts were wiped out. The months that followed were grinding ones, and the aftershocks reach into 2026. I have been following the market for roughly four years, and after leaving school I had, for the first time, the chance to give sustained attention to a subject on which I could conduct my own research, develop the way I think about systems, and sharpen my judgment against a genuinely demanding object.

This year in particular has forced a question on me that I, as an investor, would otherwise easily pass over: what does all of this actually rest on? Enormous sums are moving through these systems, grand narratives circulate about payment, identity, and the management of one’s own assets without an intermediary — and yet it remains strangely unclear what the thing is at its core. If it were ultimately only about payment and autonomy over one’s own keys, it would be hard to account for the valuations many of these networks command. And if their value drew solely from scarcity, as with gold, there would be little new about them. That is the question driving the work: what does such a cryptographic system make possible beyond decentralized payment, and does it even need to go beyond it?

To test this question against something concrete, I needed one system that could stand in for the rest and on which the question could actually be answered. I chose Ethereum. It is the first Layer 1 with native, general programmability for Smart Contracts and has the second-largest market capitalization after Bitcoin. According to Electric Capital 2025, it has the largest active developer base¹ and, by total value locked, the largest application ecosystem. It is the largest settlement layer for institutional and decentralized financial activity, holds the largest share of Stablecoin value held on-chain, and is being developed along a wide-ranging roadmap. Ethereum is frequently described as infrastructure, and that word is what sharpens the broad opening question into a testable one: does Ethereum’s architecture meet the requirements that must be placed on fundamental digital infrastructure?

I intend to give myself and the reader a clear account of the current state of such an infrastructure and of the state it could reach under full implementation of its roadmap. My own assessment comes at the end. Beside it, and weighing just as much, is the aim of giving the reader what they need to form their own, independently of mine. I work in this field, writing and publishing on Web3, and I make this the basis for an explicit commitment to neutrality — for the closer one stands to the subject, the more one owes the reader that distance. The work also accompanies my professional applications, which I name so that the reader knows the interest against which they are reading it. It was produced with the help of digital tools, including AI-assisted systems, which I used for research, structuring, and linguistic review. The research question, the evaluation framework, and every judgment that follows from them are my own responsibility. The question of utility inevitably brings a question of returns with it. I treat the latter as a consequence of the analysis and hold my judgment to account by what proves load-bearing in the long run. Whether Ethereum meets the requirements of fundamental digital infrastructure is decided on the pages that follow.

Garbsen, July 2026

Henrik Asmus