ETH Is Down 60%. I’m More Excited, Not Less.
The market is pricing ETH like a company. Ethereum is quietly becoming financial infrastructure.
Open any crypto community right now and you’ll see the same mood everywhere:
“Ethereum is weak af.”
“ETH is finished, I’m leaving this shit.”
“Ethereum is falling apart.”
By the end of May, ETH was trading around $2,000, down roughly 60% from its August 2025 high near $5,000. The ETH/BTC ratio had fallen to around 0.027. Gas fees were below 2 gwei, close to cycle lows. The depression in the Ethereum community felt real. I haven’t seen this kind of exhaustion in a long time.
But here’s the strange part.
In the middle of that same ugly sentiment, something else was happening.
BlackRock’s tokenized funds were expanding across Ethereum and other compatible networks.
JPMorgan had just launched its second tokenized money market fund on Ethereum.
A tokenization standard called ERC-7943 had just reached Final status in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Stablecoin value on Ethereum had climbed past $170 billion.
Ethereum plus its L2 ecosystem was processing around 27 million transactions a day.
When I look at those numbers next to that level of despair, I don’t see death.
I see opportunity.
Sentiment collapsed. Adoption did not.
Ask anyone who has been in crypto over the past six months what went wrong with Ethereum, and they’ll give you ten different answers.
Technically, some people say Solana and Sui are better software. Narratively, people say the “ETH is money” thesis is dead. On governance, Ethereum Foundation departures have been framed as a “generational handoff.” On price, even Bankless co-founder David Hoffman said something brutal in late May:
“Ethereum got the ETH price it deserves.”
He even joked, in effect, that maybe the move happened because he had just sold the last of his ETH.
When the true believers start doubting themselves, you know sentiment has gone below freezing.
But there’s one distinction most people are missing.
The market is pricing ETH like a company. It looks at fee revenue, onchain activity, and short-term active users. When those numbers cool down, the price follows. That’s intuitive. It’s also linear thinking.
What Ethereum is becoming cannot be understood through the lens of quarterly revenue.
Why would BlackRock use Ethereum for tokenized funds? Why would JPMorgan come back a second time? Why did Standard Chartered’s analyst say in January 2026 that “2026 will be the year of Ethereum, much like 2021 was”?
None of these institutions showed up because ETH gas fees were rising.
They showed up because Ethereum is becoming financial infrastructure.
TradFi is turning every asset into a token
This is the part people keep underestimating.
RWA.xyz data shows that by May 2026, the total value of tokenized assets globally had already passed $360 billion. Stablecoins made up the largest share, close to $300 billion. But the real story is not today’s number. It’s the direction of travel.
U.S. Treasuries are being tokenized. Money market funds are being tokenized. Private credit is being tokenized. Real estate is being tokenized. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund has grown past $2.4 billion and runs across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Aptos, Solana, and other networks. JPMorgan put its second tokenized money market fund on Ethereum that same month.
You don’t need to exaggerate this.
The important point is simple: Wall Street has started treating Ethereum as a pipe that can carry real assets.
Think about what that means.
Traditional finance has barely changed its basic structure since the New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1792. Brokers take fees. Exchanges take fees. Custodians take fees. Clearinghouses take fees. Every layer sits in the middle. Every layer extracts something.
Ethereum offers a different model: a global, permissionless, programmable ledger. Many actions that used to require several intermediaries can be compressed into automated smart-contract workflows. Brokers, clearinghouses, and custodians will not disappear overnight. But their roles will be repriced.
That is the move from a 19th-century rhythm to a 21st-century rhythm.
It won’t happen in one night. But when JPMorgan launches a second tokenized fund on Ethereum in May 2026, that is not a little experiment. That is pipe-laying.
AI agents need dollars. The kind that live onchain.
There’s another piece many people have not connected yet.
Agentic AI, AI that can make decisions and execute tasks on its own, is quickly becoming real. And AI agents need money.
Imagine an AI agent managing your supply chain. It needs to pay suppliers automatically. Or a trading bot that needs to settle positions. Or a DePIN node that needs to receive rewards based on its contribution.
All of those paths lead to the same thing:
Programmable dollars.
That is what stablecoins are for. And that is why Ethereum sits in such an important position.
Visa is tracking stablecoin adoption. PayPal has issued PYUSD. Assets like USDC, PYUSD, and BUIDL, the ones that live more naturally in institutional and compliance conversations, have deep ties to the Ethereum ecosystem. USDT is also huge on Tron, so it would be wrong to say all stablecoins live on Ethereum. But if you look at the chains institutions are willing to name in public materials, Ethereum remains one of the most important.
Why stablecoins?
Because the dollar is the global reserve currency, and a stablecoin is the dollar with an API.
Any AI agent that needs to settle in dollars needs a place to hold, send, and receive those dollars.
Ethereum provides that place.
This does not mean other chains cannot matter. Solana is fast. Base is growing. But institutions choose Ethereum for a very simple reason: the longest operating record, high security, and the most mature ecosystem.
When you are managing billions of dollars in assets, you do not choose “newer and cooler.”
You choose battle-tested.
L2s are not competition. They are expansion.
Ethereum bears have one favorite argument: L2s are stealing activity and value from Ethereum.
It sounds reasonable.
It is also wrong.
Look at the numbers. In May 2026, Ethereum plus its L2 ecosystem was processing around 27 million transactions per day. Ethereum mainnet handled roughly 2.3 million. Base handled about 8.7 million. Polygon PoS handled about 7 million. Arbitrum handled about 1.3 million.
Activity did not disappear.
It modularized.
Ethereum’s strategy was never to run every transaction on mainnet. Mainnet is the settlement and security layer. L2s are the execution layer. Ethereum gives up some direct mainnet transaction volume in exchange for a massive increase in total ecosystem throughput.
This reminds me of Amazon in 2001. The stock fell 95% from its 2000 high. Everyone said the internet was a bubble and Amazon was finished. But what was Jeff Bezos doing? He was turning Amazon from an online bookstore into a platform. Standard Chartered made that comparison directly in May 2026: today’s ETH looks like Amazon in 2001.
While everyone is complaining about ETH’s price, Ethereum’s infrastructure is expanding: more L2s, more developers, more stablecoins, more institutional adoption. The gap between price and adoption will not stay open forever.
Now, the value-capture question is real.
ETH is not a stock. It is the native asset of the Ethereum network. It secures the network through staking. It pays for execution through gas. It is collateral across DeFi. It is an ETF and treasury asset. It is the anchor asset of the ecosystem.
Low L2 fees have weakened the old deflation narrative for ETH. But that narrative was too narrow anyway. Treating ETH as “fee revenue divided by supply” is like treating the dollar as “Federal Reserve profit divided by money supply.”
You miss the whole point of a monetary network.
Vivek Raman said it well: “Ethereum is not a company. It is global infrastructure.”
Why this deserves your attention
I want to be clear about something: Ethereum can succeed and ETH can still underperform. That is a real risk. It is possible Ethereum becomes a global financial settlement layer while ETH captures less value than investors expect.
But I think the more likely path looks different.
As more real-world assets settle on Ethereum, hundreds of billions, then trillions, and eventually tens of trillions of dollars in tokenized assets, the network’s security needs rise exponentially. The only way to secure Ethereum is to stake ETH. Staking rewards come from network activity. That creates a flywheel: more assets require more security, more security requires more staked ETH, more staked ETH reduces circulating supply, and more activity increases the value of participating in the network.
That flywheel does not show up in one month or one quarter.
But over 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, it becomes a structural trend.
Tom Lee said in May 2026: “If one is wondering why Ethereum has been under selling pressure, to me, rising oil prices is the biggest headwind.”
Do you see the point?
Short-term price action may have nothing to do with crypto fundamentals. Oil prices rise. Macro uncertainty rises. Risk assets get sold. Those forces can dominate daily and weekly moves.
But they are not the fundamental story.
Fundstrat’s conclusion was: “Crypto Spring, in our view, has commenced.” A close above $2,100 would help confirm that view.
I cannot predict tomorrow’s price. Nobody can.
But when an infrastructure network is being adopted by the world’s largest financial institutions, and sentiment is sitting at absolute despair, that is often one of the best moments of the decade to pay attention.
The last thing I’ll say
On May 1, a user named @Cryptotarzan19 wrote something that stuck with me:
“Ethereum is still being valued too much like a company, and not enough like global public infrastructure.”
He also wrote:
“$8,000 ETH in 2026 looks less like a crazy target and more like a conservative repricing.”
I do not know whether ETH reaches $8,000 in 2026. Maybe it does not.
But maybe five years from now, the important thing will not be whether that exact target was right. Maybe the important thing will be that this debate existed at all.
During DeFi Summer, nobody saw that by 2026 Ethereum would carry more than $170 billion in stablecoins while global tokenized assets would reach the $360 billion range.
In the same way, in 2026, while everyone is complaining about ETH, very few people can see that Ethereum is becoming a settlement layer for global finance.
That is how nonlinear change works.
There is a threshold between “interesting” and “obvious.” Once the world crosses it, it does not go back.
The people who make real money are not the ones rushing in when everyone is euphoric. They are the ones who can sit through the doubt, see the structural direction, and stay seated.
Risk note and disclaimer: Crypto assets are highly volatile and risky. This is personal opinion, not investment advice. Do your own research and assess your own risk before making any decision. For investors with a 5-year horizon or longer, short-term volatility may be noise, but only if you can actually hold for 5 years.