Consensys: How will Ethereum, as a trusted software system, reshape the global digital economy?
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Consensys: How will Ethereum, as a trusted software system, reshape the global digital economy?
Ethereum is trusted software powering the digital world economy.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Consensys
Editing & Translation: LenaXin, ChainCatcher
Every financial transaction involves an element of trust. Ethereum’s digital trust enables the digitization of vast assets, capital, and financial transactions, significantly improving the efficiency of the global financial system and benefiting everyone from institutions to enterprises to consumers.
On July 30, Ethereum celebrated its 10th anniversary. On this occasion, Consensys released the report "The Industrialization of Trust," a detailed analysis outlining Ethereum’s investment case and the emerging technology category of "Trustware"—infrastructure that industrializes the production of trust, enabling trust to be encoded as a digital commodity.
Consensys’ research and analysis show that Ethereum has become the dominant blockchain platform, supporting over 50% of non-Bitcoin digital assets, including 60% of stablecoins, 60% of decentralized finance capital, and 80% of tokenized "real-world assets" such as stocks, money market funds, and bonds.
Ethereum's Breakthrough: Digital Trust and Trustware
Trustware is infrastructure that upgrades analog concepts of trust—such as notes and ledgers verified by human agents and auditors, guaranteed by human insurers and regulators—into equivalent digital trust concepts that can be algorithmically generated.
For centuries, human civilization has relied on various forms of trust infrastructure, ranging from tribal kinship to large institutions like governments, insurance companies, auditors, and legal systems. While these systems have facilitated cooperation and economic growth, they come at an extremely high cost. It is estimated that humanity spends over $9 trillion annually on trust-related expenses, including insurance ($8.0 trillion), legal systems (over $1.0 trillion), and auditing ($290 billion). This massive expenditure highlights a fundamental problem: current models of trust cannot scale effectively in the digital age. They are analog—slower, more expensive, and more fragmented than the always-on, highly automated, and rapidly evolving digital economy that depends on them.
Trustware endows ordinary data with the essential qualities of trust—validity and finality—through fully algorithmic processes. Validity ensures data consistency and correctness with mathematical certainty. Finality ensures data permanence, making it immutable except at great cost.
Ethereum enables these attributes to be added to data at scale without ongoing human intervention, achieving trust at near-zero marginal cost. In this way, through its robust public network and breakthrough cryptoeconomic algorithms capable of generating digital trust, Ethereum simultaneously enhances the speed, cost-efficiency, security, and scalability of financial transaction validation.
The Investment Case
For years, investors have viewed ETH as the “second-largest cryptocurrency.” That’s true—but insignificant. Now, they recognize that ETH underpins the explosive growth of stablecoins and other tokenized assets, assets they see discussed daily in commercial channels and may already be using in everyday life.
They understand that ETH powers the prediction markets they see online, and that ETH also supports the new tokenized stocks Robinhood is launching. With landmark legislative proposals like the GENIUS and CLARITY acts emerging, this wave of innovation will only intensify. Ethereum’s role as the platform powering the future global economy is increasingly recognized.
Ethereum was built for this moment from day one. In terms of security, resilience, and robustness, Ethereum stands unmatched. The tenth anniversary of its genesis block celebrates a decade of unparalleled achievement in both digital and traditional asset technologies.
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Economic Security: With over $100 billion in staked capital and more than one million validators, Ethereum has built strong defenses against attacks.
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Network Effects: Ethereum boasts the deepest liquidity, the largest developer community (twice as many as the next closest blockchain), and the richest application ecosystem. The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) standard dominates smart contract development, and all major stablecoins use Ethereum as their primary platform.
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Proven Adaptability and Continuous Upgrades: Through complex upgrades such as The Merge (transitioning to proof-of-stake, reducing energy consumption by 99.95%) and Dencun (reducing rollup fees by 90%), Ethereum has demonstrated resilience and continuous improvement throughout its first decade—with zero downtime.
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Global Neutrality and Decentralization: Unlike blockchains controlled by single corporations or entities, Ethereum is not centrally controlled. Its more than one million validator nodes span over 80 countries and regions, with over 67% operating outside the United States, demonstrating its antifragility and reliable neutrality.
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Institutional Validation and Adoption: Global institutions such as BlackRock, JPMorgan, Visa, and Franklin Templeton have begun leveraging Ethereum for tokenized assets, payments, and private equity investments, validating its security model and reliability. The total value of tokenized real-world assets on Ethereum has exceeded $13 billion, growing at a monthly rate of 6.75%.
Despite Ethereum’s technological maturity and ongoing consolidation in the digital asset infrastructure market, its economic potential remains in early stages. The total market cap of cryptocurrencies represents just 0.3% of global wealth, and tokenized securities make up only a small fraction of capital markets.
However, regulatory clarity—especially in the United States—is accelerating adoption, shifting from resistance to embracing digital assets. The convergence of artificial intelligence and blockchain is driving unprecedented demand for trustless infrastructure: as AI agents begin transacting at machine speed, they will require machine-level trust. Ethereum is the only infrastructure prepared for economic environments where algorithms must trust each other.
For institutions, holding Ether (ETH) means owning a stake in digital economic infrastructure at a price far below its ultimate value. ETH can be used to pay for network transactions and serves as a store of value. Unlike Bitcoin, ETH also generates cash flow through staking. And like equities, ETH’s value increases as the Ethereum platform grows in adoption. It combines the properties of commodity, currency, and capital asset into a unique and highly attractive asset.
As the Trustware report highlights, ETH acts as economic bandwidth, securing the issuance and trading of assets expected on the platform in the coming years, driving strong value appreciation.
The Trust Machine Is Built
The trust machine is built. It runs continuously, improves itself, creates more value, and attracts more users. The question is no longer whether to believe in Ethereum, but whether to believe in the digitization of trust. If you do, then the investment case for owning a piece of the foundational layer of the future global economy becomes self-evident.
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