Ethereum No Longer ‘Ultrasound Money’?

After months of bearish momentum, September was a month of recovery. Partly due to the Federal Reserve's decision to lower interest, the total crypto market cap was rising.

After a bearish trend, September saw a recovery in the crypto market. Total crypto market cap was rising, partly due to the Federal Reserve lowering interest. On the other side of the globe, China also cut interest rates.

This helped drive growth in several key crypto assets, including Ethereum (ETH). However, ETH failed to capitalize and showed sluggish growth, due to rising inflationary pressures of its own.

Ethereum No Longer ‘Ultrasound Money’?

While Ethereum presents itself as a deflationary asset, recent events have put that into question. On Friday, October 4, Binance’s report on the state of the crypto market in September highlights this issue for Ethereum, and how it translates to its underwhelming market performance.

In September, Ethereum’s issuance rate reached an annualized 0.74%. Like with fiat currencies, issuance of new coins translates to inflationary pressures. This puts into question Ethereum’s ‘Ultrasound Money’ narrative, which promised that ETH would be even more deflationary than Bitcoin.

This has put pressure on Ethereum’s gains in market cap. For instance, while Bitcoin’s market cap rose 7.5% in September, ETH’s market cap rose only 2.8%. Most recently, Ethereum has seen a major selling trend, with one whale dumping $48 million in ETH.

Why Ethereum is Becoming Inflationary

The likely source of this inflationary pressure is the drop in activity on the Ethereum mainnet. Notably, following the long-anticipated Decun upgrade in March, much of Ethereum traffic moved to its layer 2 chains.

While L2 chains are supposed to help with Ethereum’s scalability, they also demonstrate some adverse effects. Notably, both the Binance report and Sygil Bank’s recent report suggested that L2s are “cannibalizing” Ethereum’s traffic.

This is significant because traffic directly affects Ethereum’s inflation rate. After the Merge upgrade in 2022, Ethereum introduced a base burn rate for every transaction. At the same time, the network also creates new tokens to reward validators.

In periods of heavy network usage, such as the NFT boom, the burn rate was higher than the inflation rate. This made Ethereum deflationary. However, after the Dencun upgrade, L2s became more prominent, leading to a 15% decline in traffic for the Ethereum network.