MarsBit reported that the latest episode of Mint Ventures’ podcast WEB3 Mint To Be revisited Ethereum’s standing in the current market cycle, focusing on why ETH has lagged behind both Bitcoin and Solana and whether recent changes inside the ecosystem justify a fresh bullish reassessment. The guests were Zhou Qi, founder of EthStorage, and Mint Ventures researcher Lawrence. Their broad conclusion was that Ethereum’s weak relative performance was not accidental: it reflected a mix of strategic mistakes, long-running engineering inefficiencies, and governance trade-offs. Even so, both said recent changes in Ethereum’s scaling priorities, client optimization work, and internal restructuring have created a more credible recovery narrative for ETH than the market may be pricing in.
Why Ethereum has lagged this cycle
The speakers identified Ethereum’s rollup-centered roadmap as one of the main reasons behind the asset’s weaker showing. Zhou Qi argued that the Layer 2-centric strategy increasingly diverged from Ethereum’s own value capture. In his view, after EIP-4844 went live, the cost for Layer 2 networks to publish data to Ethereum fell sharply, but much of the economic activity generated by L2s such as Base and Arbitrum did not flow back into Ethereum itself. Those networks captured users, fees, and momentum, while ETH’s direct monetary narrative weakened. That dynamic, he said, exposed a major incentive mismatch.
A second issue was Ethereum’s pace of execution. Both guests argued that Ethereum has long prioritized research over shipping. Compared with Solana and several newer Layer 1 competitors that iterate more aggressively, Ethereum often takes years to move from roadmap discussion to implementation. Lawrence said this makes every strategic misjudgment especially costly. If the network backs the wrong direction, the time required to detect the mistake, change course, coordinate across stakeholders, and finally ship a correction is much longer than on rival chains.
They also argued that the broader market backdrop has not helped. Excluding meme-driven activity, the range and intensity of onchain business models has not meaningfully improved relative to 2021. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s fundamentals have become much stronger in the eyes of the market. In that setting, capital has had less reason to rotate toward smart contract platforms in general. Lawrence added that, with regulation softening at the margin and users rewarding speed and performance more visibly, the market’s willingness to pay a premium for “maximum decentralization” has diminished. That has reduced the power of one of Ethereum’s most important historical narratives.
What has become consensus inside Ethereum
On the question of which problems are now broadly acknowledged within Ethereum, the guests said one point appears increasingly clear: the old rollup-first strategy is no longer dominant. Lawrence noted that the Ethereum Foundation has used softer language such as “reprioritization,” but said that in practical terms the market is reading this as a strategic pivot back toward Layer 1 scaling. Zhou Qi agreed, saying Ethereum’s definition of decentralization itself is becoming more pragmatic. Instead of insisting on an idealized architecture where very low-powered devices should be able to fully participate, Ethereum now appears more willing to explore realistic trade-offs between decentralization and throughput.
He pointed to technical ideas such as block-level access lists, which can help improve execution efficiency, as an example of proposals that once received little institutional enthusiasm but are now being revisited. To him, that reflects a real shift in mindset. As hardware improves and competition intensifies, Ethereum can no longer afford to ignore obvious ways to unlock more capacity at the base layer. The change is meaningful not because it abandons Ethereum’s values altogether, but because it suggests the network is now more willing to pursue throughput and performance directly rather than speaking only in terms of distant long-term ideals.
That said, important disagreements remain unresolved. Both guests stressed that Ethereum still has no clear consensus on how much efficiency it is willing to gain at the cost of decentralization safeguards. The network’s long-standing commitment to multi-client diversity, solo staker participation, and minimizing single points of failure improves resilience, but it also slows coordination and upgrades. In their view, that tension remains the central structural issue behind Ethereum’s lower execution speed relative to chains such as Solana and Sui.
Reform timeline: restructuring, layoffs, and client-side gains
When discussing concrete actions already underway, the guests focused on three areas: Vitalik Buterin’s stated ambition to significantly expand Layer 1 capacity, visible client-side performance improvements, and internal changes at the Ethereum Foundation. Zhou Qi said Ethereum has now outlined a clearer path for increasing gas limits from roughly current levels toward materially higher throughput, supported by related EIPs and implementation work. More important, he said, recent performance tests suggest a meaningful amount of scaling can be unlocked through engineering optimization alone.
According to Zhou Qi, Ethereum execution had been operating at around 100 million gas per second in practice. He said Nethermind achieved a roughly 3x to 4x improvement through caching and related optimizations, raising the figure to around 400 million to 500 million gas per second, and that recent Geth improvements now appear capable of reaching a similar standard. In his view, this matters because those gains were not driven by a major rewrite of consensus or execution-layer specifications. Instead, they show that Ethereum had meaningful latent performance headroom that simply had not been aggressively pursued for years.
That point fed directly into the broader critique. The guests argued that Ethereum’s past weakness was not solely technical limitation, but also a lack of urgency. As competition from Solana and other chains intensified, client teams were finally pushed to optimize aggressively. To them, this is one of the strongest signs that Ethereum is responding to external pressure in a more serious way. If a large part of near-term scaling can be achieved through better engineering discipline, then the market may have been too quick to assume that Ethereum’s throughput bottleneck was immovable.
On the organizational front, recent Ethereum Foundation restructuring and layoffs were also framed as meaningful. The podcast highlighted the arrival of two new executive directors, Hsiao-Wei Wang and Nethermind founder Tomasz Stańczak, each seen as more closely tied to research-to-production execution. Lawrence said their two-year terms could improve the Foundation’s ability to translate technical direction into visible product and network upgrades. At the same time, projects seen as less directly connected to the immediate scaling agenda appear to be losing support.
Zhou Qi gave the example of Portal Network, an Ethereum-related effort focused on data storage and historical data access in a more scalable architecture. He said the project was suddenly shut down despite long collaboration, leaving full-time contributors without roles. To him, that was a strong signal that the Foundation has become far more selective about capital allocation and is now prioritizing what it considers mission-critical scaling work over longer-horizon side initiatives.
Why some investors still see a bull case for ETH
Despite all of the criticism, neither guest took a decisively bearish view on Ethereum as an asset. Zhou Qi described his stance as cautiously optimistic. He said Ethereum remains one of the rare truly decentralized ecosystems with a large and active developer base, and that it still represents one of Web3’s most important achievements in terms of open participation and network effects. In his view, a weak cycle does not erase the depth of an ecosystem built over many years, especially one that still attracts serious technical contributors.
Lawrence’s bullish case focused more on application mix. He acknowledged that many new consumer-style narratives in this cycle emerged first on Solana, but argued that financial applications continue to have a deep anchor in Ethereum and the broader EVM environment. He cited DeFi, RWA-related developments, and projects such as Ethena and HyperLiquid as evidence that Ethereum still matters most where capital, composability, and financial infrastructure are central. If regulatory easing continues, he said, future financial applications may still prefer Ethereum over faster but less institutionally embedded alternatives.
Both guests also highlighted a market dynamic that they believe may be underappreciated: ETH may not need to solve every long-term problem to re-rate higher in the medium term. If investors begin to believe that Layer 1 throughput is improving, fees are becoming more competitive, and Ethereum’s leadership is finally more execution-focused, then sentiment could recover before onchain metrics fully catch up. In that sense, part of the near-term ETH bull thesis is a repricing from deeply discounted expectations rather than a claim that Ethereum has fully fixed its structural weaknesses.
What signals could justify adding more ETH
When asked what specific facts or developments would make them more comfortable buying or increasing exposure, Lawrence said hard data alone might come too late. In his view, by the time the numbers clearly improve, much of the price move could already be over. What he wants to see is a stronger signal from the top: a more explicit acknowledgment from Vitalik that past choices were wrong, combined with a more aggressive operational stance going forward. He said Ethereum has spent too long trying not to make mistakes at all, when some degree of experimentation and failure is normal in complex software systems.
Zhou Qi approached the question from a governance and organizational angle. He argued that ETH valuation cannot be judged through traditional frameworks alone and that the more important variable is whether Ethereum’s leadership can maintain a genuinely pragmatic reform path. For him, the issue is not just protocol design but also how a large, influential ecosystem processes feedback, filters noise, and incorporates outside voices. He suggested that Vitalik’s ability to build a stronger surrounding team, listen more effectively to the broader community, and engage more openly with regulators and local political realities could become important signals of whether the recent shift is durable.
In the end, the discussion did not claim that an ETH comeback is guaranteed. Instead, it laid out a more grounded framework for reassessing Ethereum. The speakers agreed that the market’s skepticism was based on real issues: the limits of the old scaling roadmap, chronic engineering slowness, and governance friction. But they also argued that Ethereum is now showing more practical intent than it has in years. For investors, the most important things to watch next are not slogans, but whether Layer 1 scaling actually ships, whether the Foundation’s restructuring leads to faster execution, and whether Ethereum can adapt to competitive pressure without completely abandoning the principles that made it matter in the first place.