Ethereum’s Greatest Evangelist: Why Did He Sell His Belief?
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Ethereum’s Greatest Evangelist: Why Did He Sell His Belief?
The Death of a Story
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Xiao Bing, TechFlow
This is an obituary.
Not for Ethereum—it’s still alive—but for the “ETH is Money” narrative.
The author of this obituary is David Hoffman, co-founder of Bankless and, for the past six years, the world’s most tireless Ethereum evangelist. Back in 2019, when ETH was hovering around $150 and few believed it had a future, he and his co-founder coined phrases like “ETH is ultrasonic money” and “ETH is a tri-state asset.” Those very concepts—later cited repeatedly in institutional research reports—first appeared in his writings.
Then last week, he sold all his ETH.
The crypto community exploded. Some called him a traitor; others claimed he had bottom-fished. Even his co-founder Ryan joked on Twitter: “David probably sold at the absolute bottom.”
But Hoffman published a long, thoughtful essay explaining why.
After reading it, I’d say this piece deserves careful attention from every investor still holding large ETH positions.
First, the conclusion.
Hoffman is not bearish on the Ethereum network. Quite the opposite—he says he is “strongly bullish” on the Ethereum ecosystem.
What he is bearish on is the ETH token itself.
More precisely, he no longer believes ETH will undergo any meaningful repricing—neither upward nor downward.
This sounds academic. In plain English: Ethereum the chain will become increasingly successful, but that success will no longer translate into ETH’s price.
ETH’s current market cap is its fair market cap.
That’s the end of the story.
So what exactly was the “ETH is Money” story?
In short, it aimed to make ETH a new global currency—not a stablecoin, but a true store of value and safe-haven asset, competing head-to-head with gold and the U.S. dollar.
The vision was that American retirees would hold ETH in their pension funds.
It sounds sci-fi. Yet in 2021, it genuinely seemed plausible.
The most candid part of Hoffman’s essay is his admission that this story required too many things to happen simultaneously:
- The Ethereum Foundation needed to be sufficiently decentralized, yet operate with startup-level urgency.
- L2s needed to develop independently, yet remain firmly anchored under Ethereum’s umbrella.
- The technical roadmap needed flawless execution—in the right order and at lightning speed—to outpace competitors.
- The entire crypto industry needed to mature, convincing ordinary people this was the future—not just another concentrated pig-butchering scheme.
Each of these is extremely difficult.
All must succeed together for ETH to become “money.”
Then what happened?
Solana rose. BNB and TRX—the so-called “on-chain ATMs”—saw their token prices perform even more convincingly than ETH’s.
Hoffman makes a painfully sharp comparison: L1 tokens ultimately trade on their chains’ fee revenues. ETH dominated in 2021 because it captured the lion’s share of industry fee revenue. SOL’s 2024 surge followed the same logic.
What about Ethereum? It outsourced nearly all activity to L2s—L2s capture 97% of the profits; application layers claim the remainder of fees. And Ethereum’s mainnet itself?
- It provides the world’s most secure blockspace—at cost.
- It tokenizes global assets—at cost.
- It secures DeFi—at cost.
Hoffman puts it beautifully: Ethereum is a giver—not a taker.
It is the world’s most successful nonprofit organization.
It is so noble that its architecture deliberately refuses to extract value from what it creates.
By now, you should see the point.
For ETH to become money, Ethereum must “win.”
Yet the Ethereum chain, by design, has no intention of “winning.”
Its goal is to serve as foundational infrastructure—a public good, like electricity, water, or natural gas.
Can the stock of an electricity-and-water utility become gold?
No.
Hoffman writes something even sharper: For Ethereum to turn ETH into money would mean “winning a war it architecturally refuses to fight.”
Translated: You tied your own hands during design—yet still expected to win the championship?
There’s an even more awkward reality.
Hoffman cites a 2020 Bankless observation by Nic Carter: Stablecoins may have a parasitic relationship with ETH.
Back then, there were $3 billion worth of stablecoins on Ethereum.
Today, there are $163 billion—54 times more.
Is this good for the Ethereum network? Absolutely. The U.S. government now clings to Ethereum most tightly precisely because of this. The Trump administration openly stated it intends to leverage Ethereum to uphold the dollar’s hegemony.
But think carefully: Who benefits most from Ethereum’s success? The U.S. dollar.
The dollar becomes more “money-like” on Ethereum—not ETH.
Hoffman also raises an even harsher possibility.
He suggests the “strong crypto narrative”—the native-crypto, self-referential, anti-traditional-finance story embodied by DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs—may never have been viable in the first place.
Crypto enjoyed a brief “golden moment” from late 2020 to early 2022. During that window, ordinary people found it cool, rebellious, and futuristic.
Then what happened?
Frauds. Scams. Meme frenzies. Utter uselessness.
Hoffman writes: “Crypto’s public image is that of scammers, thieves, get-rich-quick myths, and something utterly worthless to ordinary people.”
He says this as Bankless’ co-founder—the person who, over the past six years, worked hardest to rehabilitate the industry’s reputation.
Money is a coordination game. A currency’s “Schelling point”—the shared consensus where everyone spontaneously chooses it as money—is sustained by belief.
The global belief that crystallized in 2021 may have been a pandemic-distorted anomaly.
That window has closed.
So Hoffman sold.
Not because he’s bearish. Because he believes the most romantic story—that ETH becomes a global currency—has reached its logical limit.
Ethereum will continue succeeding. L2s will earn enormous profits. Applications will absorb all fees.
But ETH—the token itself—will likely plateau.
No crash. No moonshot.
It has already achieved its fair market cap.
Hoffman calls this state “played out.”
Not failure—just completion.
Like a long poker game: the final card has been revealed. You won some hands, lost some—but the game is over.
At this point, let me add my own thoughts.
The most admirable people in crypto aren’t those shouting “to the moon,” doubling down when prices rise and going silent when they fall.
They’re those who once deeply believed in something, dedicated themselves to it—and then, when confronted with facts, had the courage to say, “I might be wrong.”
In the final paragraph of Hoffman’s essay, he writes:
“Ethereum chose the hardest, most ambitious, and most idealistic path. It earned its market cap. I am extremely bullish on the Ethereum network. But for the ETH token itself, I see no logical basis for repricing—in either direction.”
“So I sold my ETH—not because I’m bearish, but because I want to allocate my capital toward other opportunities I see.”
Honest. Restrained. No scapegoating. No mystification.
This is the rarest thing in crypto.
What happens to ETH next?
Who knows.
The story is over—but markets have never cared only about stories.
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