Is Ethereum Dead?

The ‘altcoin’ cycles span back now over a decade.

The first of these cycles saw the introduction of crypto most people have never heard of like Feathercoin, Ruscoin, Auroracoin and… get this… even a MurrayCoin (named after Bill Murray).

Yes folks, even back in 2013 and 2014 there were memecoins named after famous people.

And you thought what you were seeing now was original?

Anyway, there wasn’t much back then in the way of altcoins. Most were clones of Bitcoin, and some extended beyond that into the realms of different consensus mechanisms like Proof-of-Stake where you could earn more tokens, simply by holding onto tokens.

Again, this was a real period of innovation and change.

But with this cycle of booming prices, came the subsequent busting of prices. And for a few years the wild insanity of altcoins faded away.

Until 2015. Until Ethereum came along.

Retail FOMO

The long story of Ethereum’s pre-sale, token sale, funding raise, whatever you want to call it, is a long and lengthy study. Not the time to cover it all here.

What you really need to know is that Ethereum launched its main net in 2015 to much fanfare at a token price of around $1. In the months after, it traded below 50 cents.

But when 2016 rolled around Ethereum quickly started to gather momentum and crazy price swings.

From around $1 in January 2016, Ethereum exploded to $20 by the middle of the year. But the hype died away in 2016 and it ended the year around $10.

What no one really anticipated was how Ethereum would come to dominate the 2017/18 cycle. In 2017, retail investors caught first wind of this new emerging asset class called crypto. By January 2018 it was full-blown retail investor FOMO (fear of missing out) kicking into the market.

The whole industry was no longer on the fringes, but at the forefront of everyone’s mind simply because the gains up for grabs were astronomical. What Ethereum leveraged more than anything else though was the ability to use it’s ‘smart contracts’ to launch new tokens.

And as Ethereum peaked in January 2018, it exploded to a token price of $1,500. It was the crypto to own. It has since gone on to try and reshape its image as the blockchain for DeFi, the ‘world’s computer’ and a variety of other possible use cases.

However, is that just lip service? Is Ethereum all it’s cracked up to be still? Or is it a lame duck crypto in 2025?

Meanwhile…

At the time of writing, the Ethereum token price sits at $2,500. That’s just 66% higher than its 2018 peak. Meanwhile,

• Bitcoin is up 400% from its 2018 peak,

• Solana has come along in the aftermath of the 2019/20 crypto ‘winter’ and risen from around $1 to over $215.

• BNB (Binance Coin) is up 2,304% from its 2018 peak

• And even Dogecoin is up over 1,400% from its 2018 peak.

Considering the long-held belief that Ethereum would one day flip the market cap of Bitcoin (known as ‘the flippening’), that increasingly looks unlikely.

Solana beats it on cost and speed, Bitcoin beats it on store of value and Dogecoin beats it on community. Our question is, what really does Ethereum offer to the world now other than it was early?

Of course, as we ask these questions, and no doubt Ethereum ‘maxis’ will have our neck for even suggesting this, Eric Trump throws his hat in the ring on ETH,

Maybe Ethereum becomes the blockchain of Trumps, their preferred way to wheel and deal? It’s hard to say where Ethereum heads from here.

But with increasing competition from other networks, a languishing token price (and community outrage building all the meanwhile) and retail FOMO seemingly looking elsewhere, we must ask, is Ethereum dead?

Trust in crypto,
Adam Atlantic

[1] https://x.com/EricTrump/status/1886541132903133230