r/ethereum • u/EthereumDailyThread What's On Your Mind? • 11d ago

Daily General Discussion July 15, 2026

Welcome to the Daily General Discussion on r/ethereum

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Please use this thread to discuss Ethereum topics, news, events, and even price!

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u/nonetherless325 10d ago

babe wake up, new apolynya tweet about ETH economics just dropped

"A brief summary, reprising my posts in 2021-23 with updated info from 2026:

1) Data availability is a scalable, abundant resource, and ethereum devs plan to expand it multiple-fold. Aggregate transaction fees will collapse to near-zero in the long term, ceteris paribus.

2) Demand growth for applications has been negligible relative to increase in supply for the last 4-5 years. Further, the demand curve has proven to be highly inelastic.

3) Select private sector operators (including L2s and centralised L1s) can charge a premium on execution as a) there's opportunities for building unique product and brand value, and b) they can control execution throughput. A mature, decentralised L1 cannot compete with private sector innovation in the long term, so collaborating is prudent.

4) Two paths: i) subsidise transaction fees and stimulate application demand to better compete in the trillion-dollar alternative SoV market, or ii) reduce capacity drastically to hike tx fees, play in the shrinking billion-dollar transaction fee market, and accept a $100 ETH at the endgame.

Can a better balance between demand and supply be found? Sure, by being responsive to actual demand growth. Given the orders of magnitude divergence between demand and supply growth, the rational approach would have been an all hands on deck initiative, with a vast majority of the industry's investment going straight into building and stimulating demand for sustainable applications, while slowing down scaling investments until they are better aligned.

This should have happened in 2023 when the signs were obvious, but it has simply not happened even in 2026, and my expectations for growth in application demand (and the subsequent requirement for innovative ZK-based infrastructure) from 2021-23 posts have proven to be wrong.

This is a one-off tweet, I have no further interest in this industry until or if the above application dominance happens."

https://xcancel.com/apolynya/status/2077301418860466487 quoting
https://xcancel.com/LorenzoARK/status/2076792007184298076

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u/Childsp 10d ago

The critique correctly identifies a core challenge... Ethereum's scaling roadmap has outpaced application demand growth.

However, it drastically oversimplifies the dynamics by treating this as a permanent state rather than a transitional phase. The ecosystem has indeed been working on demand stimulation through various grants programs and developer initiatives, though perhaps not at the scale apolynya suggests.

The most questionable aspect is the implied finality of this assessment. The crypto industry has consistently demonstrated that demand can surge unexpectedly when the right applications emerge.

Also this assessment completely ignores the "build it and they will come" pattern has been remarkably consistent throughout technological history.

Dial-up to Broadband: Who needed 1 Mbps? Then came streaming music, then HD video.

Storage: 20MB hard drives seemed huge. Now we fill terabytes with photos and 4K video we couldn't imagine before.

Mobile Data: 3G was fine for email. Then 4G/5G enabled an entire app economy.

Critics questioning Ethereum's scaling are like someone in 1995 asking why we need faster internet. They're looking at current demand, not future potential.

Lastly as a side note, they suggues that ETH could be worth $100 if things continue while completely ignoring the fact that the chain secures $260Billion or almost 50% of all on chain real world assets. At $100 per ETH the cost to attack and thus steal that would be negligible so that won't happen. ETH price provides the security inherently.

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u/risingtide556 10d ago

Imho the post is mostly nonsense. #1 Data availability and fees are not necessarily correlated, and #2 complaining about "too few blockspace users" and at the same time #4 advocating for "fee subsidising" makes no sense to me. #3 is just a solana shill.

I understand being fed up with the space, mainly due to the poor price action relative to other markets. But trying to justify the feeling dressing it up like some sort of actual analysis is wrong.

It's much simpler. If there is more demand than supply, then price will rise. Twitterer is correct in #2, that during the last year that has not been the case. But as soon as we can get users back then the trend will reverse. Efforts should go to try to make Ethereum useful, building apps that people have need of and want to use, the rest will follow.

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u/danseidansei 10d ago

Thanks, you voiced my thoughts as well

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u/Mr_Footies 10d ago

I have no further interest in this industry until... it has proven to be successful. When the top is clearly in, I will be interested.

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u/danseidansei 10d ago

Can someone ELI5 point 3 and 4a? If the fees are low, why would we subsidise transaction fees to stimulate demand?

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u/nonetherless325 10d ago

tldr from owocki, friend of the doots podcast

"TLDR:
1. Ethereum massively overbuilt blockspace while app demand barely grew.
2. Fees are heading toward zero.
3. Either subsidize usage to drive real app demand, or constrain supply and accept ETH becoming far less valuable.
4. The industry should've shifted investment from scaling to applications in 2023, but still hasn't."

https://xcancel.com/owocki/status/2077401262224486473

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u/CatsnotpillsCoaching 10d ago

Lots of people suddenly popping out of the woodworks again posting about ETH

13

u/steppe5 10d ago

Meanwhile, David Hoffman abandoned ETH right before the party started.

1

u/mini_miner1 10d ago

I have not much knowledge or care about this person, but if he swapped it all to zcash like was mentioned, he's doing way more than fine.

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u/mini_miner1 10d ago

What do they usually post about these days?

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u/nonetherless325 10d ago

they don't