As Ethereum turns 11 years old it hosts $148B in stablecoins, but daily mainnet revenue just fell to $330k
Ethereum’s 11th anniversary marks a transition from survival to harder tests. It remains the main venue for stablecoins, DeFi, and tokenized assets, with about $148.8 billion in stablecoins and $15.5 billion in real-world assets on the network. Fees have fallen sharply as mainnet and L2 costs dropped, improving usability but weakening ETH’s fee-burn value narrative. The key question is whether ETH can still capture value in an L2-heavy world. Proposed answers include ETH as preferred collateral, staking asset, and monetary premium, plus more blob demand and rollup economics flowing back to the base layer. The biggest risk is that L2s, issuers, and apps absorb most economic value while ETH becomes optional. Ethereum also faces governance and architecture challenges: rollups differ widely in security guarantees, more independent institutions may dilute accountability, and scaling must not weaken credible neutrality. Upcoming priorities include more capacity, better security, zkEVMs, and post-quantum readiness.
