An analyst from Messari sparked an animated debate over the weekend after having declared that Ethereum is “dying” because network revenues decreased in August.
In a post X on Saturday, research director Messari, AJC, said that “Ethereum’s fundamentals collapse” because Ethereum’s revenues against costs in August were $ 39.2 million, down more than 40% of one year on the other and around 20% per month.
But many of those who read the post disagreed, pointing to growing Ethereum, applications, the stablecoin supply, L2 scaling and distinction between Ethereum being a commodity, rather than a technology stock – which means that it should not be valued on the basis of income.
Ethereum is always a dynamic ecosystem
A large part of the drop in Ethereum revenues occurred from the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, which lowered the transaction costs for layer 2 scaling networks using it as a base layer to publish transactions.
Explaining Cointelegraph, Henrik Andersson, investment director of the Apollo Crypto investment company, said that it is unlikely that Ethereum is dying, because data from the Ethereum L2S Growthpie analysis tool show that it is always “a dynamic ecosystem with the stable range and the active addresses are all proximity “.
As of August 30, there were also more than 552,000 daily active addresses in Ethereum according to the investment research platform Ycharts, representing an increase of 21% since the same era in 2024.
“We believe that Ethereum and Bitcoin have a place in a crypto wallet,” said Andersson.
“Ethereum becomes the neutral decentralized base layer for finance and just as Bitcoin is not assessed on income, but as a reserve of value, we do not think that Ethereum can be evaluated solely on its income.”
In response to criticism, however, the AJC defended its use of income to assess the blockchain of layer 1, explaining that because it is collected in Ether (ETH), one of the largest motors of historic consumption is now “trend towards zero”.
At the same time, the AJC argued that active addresses and transactions are “statistics without meaning with regard to demand”.
Ethereum has been declared “dead” 40 times this year
Ethereum has been declared by various sources at least 150 times since 2014; Most of these deaths have been recorded this year, with around 40 years, according to Ethereum Blows.
Ryan McMillin, director of investments at Merkle Tree Capital, told Cintelegraph that Ethereum continues to adapt and is generally declared dead in moments of narrative weakness, the drop in costs, the trend in lower transactions or when competitors exceed it.
He said that in theory, because intelligent contracts are a competitive sector, developers and capital could migrate slowly but permanently elsewhere.
“But in practice, its community of developers, its rooted protocols and its regulatory acceptance give it more power than necrologies suggest it; His current account is that he will be the tradfi choice chain, although ETF soil can also disrupt this, “said McMillin.
“The biggest story is that crypto matures in an ecosystem of differentiated assets, and Ethereum will remain one of the central parts for the coming years, and competition with other L1 is very healthy.”
McMillin said he did not think that Ethereum was “dying”, but said that he has been stuck in a “difficult place” for almost two years because he has been trapped between Bitcoin’s account as a digital or Solana’s height as a faster and cheaper alternative.
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“The ultra-sound monetary framework of Ethereum was never going to win against Bitcoin’s harder monetary premium, and with regard to flow and cost, Solana simply offers a magnitude of improvement,” he said.
According to McMillin, an area that helped Etherum in 2025, which unlocked traditional financing flows and positioned it as a leverage game on the adoption of stables and network growth, according to McMillin.
“But this advantage cannot last long, the Solana ETFs are expected in the coming weeks, which could quickly level the rules of the game for capital entries.”
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