Recently, the split between bullish and bearish views on Ethereum has heated up again, with the market focusing on a key question: can the ecosystem value of the Ethereum network eventually be transmitted and reflected in the price of ETH? This collection of viewpoints outlines the main arguments of both the bulls and the bears.
Bullish proponents emphasize Ethereum's foundational role as a smart contract platform, the fee-burning mechanism, and the demand growth brought by L2 scaling. In contrast, bearish voices worry about value capture migrating to L2s, depressed staking yields, and macro liquidity tightening's impact on risk assets. Despite the growth in DeFi TVL and L2 transaction volumes, on-chain activity has not correspondingly lifted ETH's market capitalization, giving rise to the "value decoupling" narrative that underpins the bearish case. The debate over value backflow for Ethereum is, in essence, a critical test for the token economic model of a Layer-1 public chain in the era of multi-layer scaling.