Toronto – Ethereum has just completed its most important upgrade in more than a year, but the milestone comes after a turbulent section for blockchain. The price of ether (ETH) has decreased, the developers have migrated to rival platforms, and the Ethereum Foundation – a projectless non -profit steward – was faced with a lack of coordination and vision.
Speaking on a panel of the Coindesk consensus conference in Toronto, Paul Brody – world leader in blockchain at Ey and president of the Ethereum Alliance – and Josh Stark Ethereum of the Ethereum Foundation, offered a more optimistic view of the coming road.
There are two things that the community is looking for, said Stark. First, “the ecosystem needs stronger leadership … stronger leadership on the roadmap, the execution of this roadmap and really helps coordinate the ecosystem to meet the major challenges.”
Second, the network needs better messaging. “The fundamentals of Ethereum are incredibly strong, but few people get up to tell the story of this ecosystem and stimulate incredible things during construction,” said Stark.
Despite all its recent difficulties, Stark and Brody argued that Ethereum remains the most innovative project and focused on crypto.
Brody suggested that the concerns about the leaders of the Foundation are particularly exaggerated, giving the former executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Aya Miyaguchi, better grades for his mandate, which began in 2018 and ended this year.
“Ethereum is a work chain with more than 120 layer 2 networks,” said Brody. The network’s capacity, he added, is close to “300 and 450 million transactions per day”. In addition, “transaction costs at level L2 – they on average under one penny per transaction in the last three months,” said Brody. “If I step back and look [Miyaguchi’s] Tenure very objectively in terms of results, I would say a plus. »»
Miyaguchi went to the president of the Ethereum Foundation in March 2025, installing HSIAO-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak as new co-executive directors-part of a leadership restructuring aimed at improving the strategic objective of the Foundation.
Some criticisms argued that the Ethereum roadmap relied too much on layer 2 rolls – independent blockchains that treat transactions at a lower cost and quickly before “adjusting” their history on the main channel of Ethereum. Brody defended the roadmap centered on the network: “I’m delighted,” he said.
While the layer -2 such as optimism, Arbitrum and the basic Coinbase network have lowered user costs – generally considered to be the main front wind for a wider network adoption – skeptics also say introduce new security risks and fragmentation obstacles that threaten the fundamental value proposal of Ethereum.
“Ethereum East Ethereum,” said Brody. “What is, identify a problem, solve it and go to the following problem. In terms of the biggest problem with which we are dealing in recent years, it was a scale, right? Going from the possibility of making one million transactions per day to 450 million network capacities is excellent. ”
“All ecosystems will end up with something like a L2 roadmap with modularity and specialization,” added Stark. “We are only those who went the most distant on this path, and we found the twists and turns and the challenges on this road, and we are dealing with them.”
ETHER (ETH), the native token of the network, has long been considered a first -rate cryptographic asset. But in recent months, he has underperformed compared to certain competitors. Network tokens are often considered an indirect indicator of the overall health of an ecosystem.
Bitcoin, noted Stark, has successfully positioned itself as a reliable store of value, helping him to resist the market more favorably than Ethereum. “Ethereum has a more complicated story,” he said.
However, Stark expressed its confidence that the market would possibly reflect the deeper value of Ethereum.
“The world will not stop learning these technologies and systems,” he said. “The world will have an appetite for a slightly more complicated real value proposal.
