What happened to Ethereum? Is there still hope for Ethereum?

Ever since Bitcoin broke through its previous high (US$69,000) in 2024, while Ethereum has been moving further and further away from its previous high (US$4,800), doubts about Ethereum in the market have become increasingly louder.

author:

ABC Alpha Researcher - Twitter ID @Cyrus_G3

Ever since Bitcoin broke through its previous high (US$69,000) in 2024, while Ethereum has been moving further and further away from its previous high (US$4,800), doubts about Ethereum in the market have become increasingly louder.

By 2025, Ethereum fell below $3,000 in February, below $2,000 in March, and even below $1,500 in April. The market sentiment towards Ethereum has gradually shifted from doubt to despair and abandonment. Many ancient addresses from the ICO era have also begun to gradually clear out Ethereum. The leading institutions that once supported Ethereum have also begun to waver.

What happened to Ethereum? Is there still hope for Ethereum?

This article will focus on these two issues and start from the following five aspects to review the rise and fall of Ethereum and look forward to its possible future.

1. Ethereum’s glorious years (2017-2022)

July 2014, Ethereum launched ICO

However, from 2014 to 2016, the price of Ethereum has been below $10. At this stage, Ethereum only had the name of Blockchain 2.0, and the smart contract technology was also cool, but Ethereum was of no use at that time.

In 2017, the era of ICOs began, and Ethereum became very useful. People bought ETH to participate in ICOs. By January 13, 2018, Ethereum had risen from $10 at the beginning of 2017 to $1,430, reaching its first new high in history.

According to incomplete statistics, more than 2,500 tokens used ETH to launch ICOs from 2017 to early 2018. At this stage, the greatest value of Ethereum is the issuance of coins. ETH is not only the GAS token with the largest consumption on the chain, but also the only bargaining chip to participate in the IOC wealth wave.

Although many new public chains such as NEO, QUTM, EOS, and TRON were born during this stage, the market share of other public chains combined is almost negligible in the ICO and smart contract market exclusively monopolised by Ethereum.

At this stage, Ethereum has enjoyed huge dividends from innovators!

2018-2019 is the era of hundreds of chains

Due to the success of Ethereum, countless new public chains have emerged in the market. In addition to the ones mentioned above, we list a few more public chains that many people may not be familiar with, such as: GXC, NULS, ELF, Algorand, etc.

Of course, during this stage, some public chains emerged that are still active today, such as: TON, ADA, Cosmos, Avalanche, and of course, the most famous of them is Solana. Yes, Solana was not outstanding among the new public chains at the time, but a few years later, it became the biggest challenger to Ethereum, which is quite touching.

Although, at this stage, there are numerous new public chains that attempt to challenge Ethereum, Ethereum still absolutely monopolises the smart contract market. Smart contracts were first created by Ethereum, and the era of smart contracts was opened by Vitalk. Vitalik has great appeal and influence in the global Crypto field, second only to Satoshi Nakamoto. The Ethereum ecosystem also gathers the largest number of smart contract developers and countless native Crypto technology and thought innovators in the world. All of this will be fully demonstrated in the coming 2020.

Finally, it is 2020, the summer of DEFI that countless people yearn for and the absolute highlight moment of Ethereum, has finally arrived.

After silent fermentation and continuous exploration from 2018 to 2019, DEFI Protocol, one of the earliest Crypto-native applications, finally broke out in the Ethereum ecosystem in the summer of 2020.

Compound's amazing liquidity mining directly detonated the market. A large amount of ETH was used to mint COMP. The skyrocketing TVL and platform coins started a wave of liquidity mining.

Uniswap, invested by Vitalik himself, opened the era of on-chain DEX with the minimalist formula of X*Y=K

Yearn.Finance launches DEFI yield aggregator, #YFI soars 10,000 times in 30 days and is far ahead

DAI launched by MakerDAO is the first decentralized stablecoin on Ethereum.

Curve’s stablecoin DEX allows many stablecoins and DEFI tokens to obtain smooth liquidity on Ethereum

…….

DEFI Summer has pushed everyone's expectations for Ethereum to a peak, because Ethereum can not only