IOSG's definition of Ethereum's value is generally conservative.
Direct conclusion: The biggest value of Ethereum is as a neutral, serious, secure financial system that transcends nations and geographic boundaries!!!
Currently, governments of third‑world and developing countries cannot provide comprehensive and robust financial services. Ethereum, as a completely neutral financial system, can effectively supplement the four traditional financial needs—banking, securities, insurance and trust—of local peoples, as well as other related social needs, e.g., verification of public education, vocational skill certificates, etc.
Why can only Ethereum do this???
A serious system capable of serving large institutions or even national‑level financial demand must meet the following four criteria (skip to the conclusion if you don’t want to read the details):
Transaction completeness and finality (Settlement Finality)
Once a transaction is confirmed, it must be irreversible, have legal finality, and must not be subject to forks or double‑spend risk. Traditional financial systems (e.g., RTGS real‑time gross settlement) require deterministic settlement; a blockchain must achieve strong finality through design (e.g., permissioned chains, consensus optimisation) rather than probabilistic finality (as with Bitcoin).
Regulability & Compliance
The system must support penetrative supervision by regulators, KYC/AML, freeze/recovery mechanisms, auditable data, etc. It cannot be “anonymous, anarchic” like Bitcoin. Serious applications (e.g., stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, clearing) need a “regulable blockchain” that supports regulatory nodes and on‑chain governance compliant with laws.
Security & Reliability
The system must not crash, must resist 51% attacks, and achieve financial‑grade fault tolerance (high availability, strong consistency). Serious finance cannot tolerate “system problems”; it must meet reliability standards of financial market infrastructure (e.g., zero downtime or extremely low failure rates), unlike the “experimental” early public chains.
Performance & Scalability
It must support high throughput, low latency, high concurrency (e.g., tens of thousands of transactions per second) to satisfy real‑time payment and clearing needs. Early Bitcoin/Ethereum TPS was too low to support serious finance, so next‑generation designs (e.g., token‑chain separation, multi‑token on one chain, parallel processing) are required.
PS: This section introduces Professor Cai Weide’s viewpoint.
Conclusion: At present, only Ethereum possesses this capability; other public chains are essentially toys or casinos. Of course, external challengers constantly try to rebuild an equivalent or higher‑level system. Previously there was Libra (now Aptos and Sui), and now there are Pharos and Canton, but they are all in a catch‑up stage. Ethereum remains the most complete.
Ethereum’s current challenges!!!
Coinciding with Thomaz’s departure from Ethereum (the classic do‑the‑work person left~), there are still many areas that need adjustment. The most urgent is the infrastructure‑ecosystem‑users/liquidity triad, which lacks a virtuous cycle. Infrastructure is continuously developing at the technical layer, but the ecosystem is constantly losing participants; users rely solely on the natural growth of ecological niches, and the user side has not been consciously clarified.
From a systems perspective, the Ethereum ecosystem can be seen as a small island with external circulation and an internal economic cycle. Are you actively optimising the internal ecological interest‑rate system? A well‑designed interest‑rate scheme creates a spread with external liquidity, attracting external investors and liquidity, while rich internal rates help on‑chain users better match risk and liquidity, thereby retaining capital internally. After all, Ethereum is a financial system~~~ Infrastructure, ecosystem, and users/liquidity are all indispensable (repeating).
Example: Nokia’s TMD phones still have die‑hard fans—what good is that? Without an ecosystem, you can’t even use WeChat; buying a pack of cigarettes becomes a problem. No matter how good the phone’s underlying hardware is, it’s useless!
Finally,
If Bitcoin is a negative‑feedback mechanism for governments that mismanage currency (absorbing the liquidity of over‑issued money), then Ethereum is a negative‑feedback mechanism for governments that fail to establish comprehensive financial services.
What value do you assign to this mechanism?