24h Majors & Movers
	BTC $75.9k	↘ 2%			HYPE $59.8	↘ 2%
	ETH $2.1k	↘ 2%			WLD $0.4	↗ 14%
	SOL $84	↘ 2%			RENDER $2.3	↗ 4%

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• 🕶️ Kohaku released alpha privacy tooling for Ethereum wallets to integrate Railgun directly into their interfaces, allowing users to route private transactions through Railgun without leaving the wallet.
• 📊 Hyperliquid launched HIP-4 markets for offchain events, using validators rather than external oracles as sources of truth. The 1st markets are May's CPI year-over-year change, June's Fed rate change, and the Champions League Winner.
• 🔵 Base rolled out Base MCP, letting users operate Base Accounts via ChatGPT and Claude, allowing them to prompt token swaps, transfers, portfolio tracking, app interactions, and beyond.

Dear Bankless Nation, 

I hope you enjoyed the long weekend. I spent the weekend working on what I feel I owe to the Ethereum community, and to the crypto industry broadly. 

If you missed the news last week, I sold my ETH. 

For someone who built a career, community, identity, and business around Ethereum, this choice does not come lightly. 

The decision to sell deserves a more thorough explanation than the scattered tweets on Twitter. What you read below is a summarized version of a more robust article available on Bankless.com. I encourage you to go read it in its entirety, but if you are strapped for time, a summarized version is below. 

tl;dr: the ETH is money thesis didn't fail… it’s played out and Ethereum got the ETH price it deserves, and I don’t see ETH being rerated as an asset, higher or lower. 

I am still massively bullish Ethereum. I expect Ethereum as a network to do exceptionally well from here on out. I think only a marginal amount of that success will be reflected in ETH. Nonetheless, don’t expect any change in Ethereum-related content coming out of Bankless — it's still the best network humanity will ever create. 

ETH Is Money Was Always a Longshot

Money is a coordination game, and coordination is brutally hard. 

Ethereum stacked a multitude of coordination problems on top of each other across every layer of its techno-social design, and the "ETH is money" thesis quietly assumed all of them would resolve cleanly. ETH would become money only if every layer of Ethereum outperformed its competition with real confidence. That was a tall order, and in hindsight the margin of error was thinner than I gave it credit for.

Ethereum has done remarkably well. It earned the market cap it carries. But the window for the market to rerate ETH into the maximal version of money is closing.

Consider what had to go right:

• Leadership needed enough decentralization to stay credibly neutral while still moving with the urgency of a startup facing extinction. 
• L2s needed freedom to make their own market calls while staying economically chained to the Ethereum brand. 
• The roadmap needed the correct sequencing to maximize and preserve momentum. 
• Mission-critical tech had to be built fast enough to both prove utility and outrun rivals. 

Each of those is a coordination win on its own, and the "ETH is money" thesis required all of them simultaneously.

The Environment May Never Have Allowed It Anyway 

By 2026 the data is clear: L1 activity, fees, and native-asset price move together. ETH dominance peaked when its fee share peaked in 2021. In 2024, SOL ran alongside Solana’s growth of revenue share. Today, NEAR is rerating now alongside real revenue and burn.

ETH was only going to escape the gravity of valuation-by-revenue through brute dominance, and it did not hold dominance long enough to achieve the maximum version of "ETH is money." 

Today, Ethereum’s architecture gets in the way of its resuming momentum. Ethereum is a giver, not a taker. 

It supplies the world's most secure blockspace, at cost. It tokenizes global assets, at cost. It secures DeFi, at cost — no markup anywhere. 

That is the beauty of open-source infrastructure and a core feature of the project. It also makes ETH an asset Ethereum architecturally declines to prioritize. 

There was also the cultural bet. The ambitious version of crypto, the user-owned software revolution, never crossed the chasm. The commoditized ledger version won instead, which made crypto a useful vassal of traditional finance rather than a replacement for it. ETH being money depended on the bigger dream working, and it mostly has not.

The ETH is money thesis did not fail. It just stopped short of its fullest form. I am still bullish on the network and its ecosystem. I didn’t sell my ETH because I am bearish, rather simply because I see better opportunities elsewhere... 

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