A Messari analyst sparked heated debate over the weekend after declaring Ethereum is “dying” as network revenue declined in August.
In an X post on Saturday, Messari research manager AJC stated that “Ethereum’s fundamentals are collapsing,” as Ethereum’s revenue from fees in August was $39.2 million, down over 40% year-over-year and approximately 20% month-over-month.
Source: AJC
But many who read the post disagreed, pointing to Ethereum’s rising metrics, app revenue, stablecoin supply, continued L2 scaling and a distinction between Ethereum being a commodity, rather than a tech stock — meaning it shouldn’t be valued based on revenue.
Ethereum is still a vibrant ecosystem
A large part of Ethereum’s fall in revenue has come as a result of the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, which lowered transaction fees for layer-2 scaling networks using it as a base layer to post transactions.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Henrik Andersson, chief investment officer of investment firm Apollo Crypto, said it is unlikely Ethereum is dying, because data from Ethereum L2s analytics tool growthepie shows it’s still “a vibrant ecosystem with stablecoin supply, throughput, and active addresses are all at or close to all-time high.”
As of Aug. 30, there were also over 552,000 daily active addresses on Ethereum according to investment research platform YCharts, representing a 21% increase since the same time in 2024.
There were over 552,000 daily active addresses on Ethereum as of Aug. 30. Source: YCharts
“We believe both Ethereum and Bitcoin have a place in a crypto portfolio,” Andersson said.
“Ethereum is becoming the neutral decentralized base layer for finance and just like Bitcoin is not valued on revenue but as a store of value, we don’t believe Ethereum can be valued solely on its revenue.”
In response to critics, however, AJC defended his use of revenue to value the layer-1 blockchain, explaining that because it’s collected in Ether (ETH), one of the largest historical demand drivers of consumption is now “trending toward zero.”
At the same time, AJC argued that active addresses and…
..
