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Ethereum is now inflationary since the Merge, having undone almost a full year of burns.

It sounds bad. Especially considering how much fuss was made about ETH doubling as ultra-sound money — resistant to supply increases that might destabilize its price over time.

Blobs have made it much more difficult. Maybe it’s time to retire the narratives. Be what you are. And in Ethereum’s case, it’s still figuring that out, just like the rest of us.

Elsewhere:

• BTC has bounced off support at $97,400 multiple times in the past day. Current price: $98,260, or about 10% below all-time high.

• Over $482 million has flowed out of Binance in the past 24 hours, the largest outflow since Trump’s inauguration.

• Celestia has set a new weekly record for blob data of 121,782 MiB, per Blockworks Research data, thanks largely to Eclipse.

🥵 Hot seat

ETH’s not having a good time. 

And it didn’t just start with this weekend’s selloff. We’ve got “wartime” Vitalik Buterin, criticisms of the Ethereum Foundation, not to mention price action (it’s down 10% over the past week).

On the positive side, at least Eric Trump still seems bullish and — in a now-edited post on X — initially encouraged folks to buy ETH, adding “you can thank me later.” But I’m not sure that’s the type of support anybody wants right now. 

There’s a lot of discussion about what went wrong and how to right the ship. The recent sentiment is nothing new, Tribe Capital’s Evan Park told me. 

“When I was at Devcon, I noticed a steep disconnect between the foundation focusing on infrastructure, while retail users and the broader crypto community were demanding exciting new applications. On the one hand, ETH L2s like Base, Ink, and MegaETH are positioned to onboard new applications and users. However, what Ethereum leaders need to realize is that they face accelerating competition from established L1s like Solana and new L1s like Berachain and Monad, which are poised to dominate mindshare over the next year,” he explained. 

Even with Buterin signaling a “greater sense of urgency,” we’re in a ‘can’t stop, won’t stop’ moment in the market. Berachain, just yesterday, announced that its mainnet is launching tomorrow.

In my conversation with Blockworks Research’s Ryan Connor, he explained that he and his team had initially been “excited” about Max Resnick’s potential cultural impact at ETH. But when that didn’t pan out, and Resnick jumped to Solana, the excitement dissipated. 

The situation now is “pretty dire” post-Resnick but Connor told me that there are still ways to, well, make ETH great again.

“Bringing execution back to the base layer is the very simple way of putting it. How do you do that? You scale it technically. You compete with the L2s. You change the culture of the ETH organization, the people who are shipping the upgrades, and the app developers that live on that chain. [It’s] way easier said than done. You have to basically abandon these like very niche political, philosophical views that many people in that ecosystem hold [though] I think it's clear over a multi-year period that they're not willing to do,” he explained.

That includes leaving the “hardware requirements” focus at the door. 

While there are technical things that can be done, it’s going to come down to changing the culture. And that, Connor acknowledged, is not going to be an easy battle to win. 

Connor compared it to the Department of Motor Vehicles: It doesn’t matter who’s in charge of the department, they can’t just switch on “wartime” mode and change everything. It just, unfortunately, doesn’t work like that. 

Whether or not Buterin and EF are politicked to the point of being similar to a government department remains to be seen.  

— Katherine

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Get ready — Unichain is launching soon!

Designed to be the home for DeFi and liquidity across chains, Unichain is an L2 that will launch with 95% lower transaction fees than Ethereum L1 — and will soon offer blazing-fast 250ms block times for near-instant transactions. As part of the Optimism Superchain, Unichain is built for interoperability and will support ERC-7683 for seamless cross-chain transactions beyond the Superchain.

Stay in the loop — visit Unichain.org and follow @Unichain on X for updates!

• The XRP Ledger’s back up and running after a brief downtime. 

• A new home: Blockworks’ 1000x podcast has a new feed accompanying its episode on the weekend meltdown.

• Bullish Global may be taking advantage of a friendlier crypto environment to pursue an IPO later this year, according to a Bloomberg report.

🌊 Liquidity events

The days of bullish exchange listings may be over.

I spent the morning reviewing price data for every coin listed on Binance and Coinbase since the start of last year. The results are rough.

In total, there were 84 new listings across both exchanges — 45 on Binance and 40 on Coinbase.

As of this morning, only 12 of those listings have increased in value from their initial trade price on either platform.

On the chart below, each circle represents a different coin listing, starting on the far left in January 2024 and ending on the right with the most recent new addition on Coinbase, VVV.

As you can see, VVV’s 40% collapse on its list price — despite its rally in its first few hours of trade — is not an outlier. 

Since December, more than a dozen listings have suffered the same fate. MOODENG, MOG, MOVE, ACX, ORCA, GIGA, ME, TURBO, VELO, USUAL, AIXBT, CGPT, COOKIE, PNUT and TRUMP have all lose value since hitting either Coinbase or Binance — in many cases by more than two--thirds.

Of course, there have been winners. AERO, the native token for Base liquidity hub Aerodrome, is up 640% since it was listed on Coinbase in February last year. 

DRIFT, the token for the Solana perps DEX, and ONDO, for the real-world asset platform, have also posted similarly great returns.

Granted, we already know that most cryptocurrencies probably won’t make it. So perhaps it’s all par for the course. 

Coins, especially smaller-cap ones, are painfully tied to whatever happens to the price of bitcoin. Still, it’s obvious that it’s only a matter of time until the market realises the paradigm has shifted. 

Historically, common sense has suggested that an exchange listing is a milestone for a coin — opening their markets up to wider investor bases and deeper liquidity. 

It wouldn’t surprise me if we start to see the general public urging projects not to list their coins on major exchanges moving forward.

— David

From macroeconomic shifts to the evolving role of crypto in global markets, Mohamed El-Erian brings decades of financial expertise to the stage. Mike Novogratz, one of the earliest institutional investors in digital assets, unpacks what’s next for the space. And Anatoly Yakovenko, the mind behind Solana, breaks down how high-performance blockchains are shaping the future of finance.

DAS NYC is where the real conversations happen — no hype, just sharp insights from the people driving digital assets forward.

📅 March 18-20 | NYC

On our mind: Ethereum killers