I think the market is judging $ETH with the wrong scoreboard.
Ethereum mainnet fees are important, but they are only one part of the asset’s economic role.
More than 40M ETH is currently staked, equal to roughly 32% of the supply. Ethereum also holds around $41B in DeFi TVL, nearly $150B in stablecoins and close to $15B in active RWAs.
Its scaling ecosystem secures another $34B+ across L2s.
To me, this is a much stronger way to understand ETH:
It is the asset validators stake to secure Ethereum.
It is one of the deepest and most widely accepted forms of collateral in DeFi.
And it is the native asset used by rollups to purchase Ethereum’s settlement and data availability.
The concern around value accrual is still valid.
EIP-4844 made L2 transactions much cheaper by moving rollup data into blobs. That was great for scaling, but it also reduced the immediate fees flowing through the L1.
So the real question is not whether Ethereum can produce the highest TPS.
It is whether growing activity across L2s, stablecoins, DeFi and tokenized assets will eventually create enough demand for Ethereum’s security, settlement and blobspace to flow back into ETH.
That part is not fully proven yet.
But I still believe the market is focusing too much on today’s fee revenue while overlooking the amount of capital already depending on Ethereum.
I’m holding $ETH because I don’t see it as another L1 competing for transaction count.
I see it as a reserve collateral and settlement asset for an onchain financial system that is still being built.