# Ethereum The second-largest crypto asset and the programmable counterpart to [[Bitcoin]]: launched July 2015, co-founded by [[Vitalik Buterin]], converted to proof-of-stake in the September 2022 Merge. Where Bitcoin's culture hardened into libertarian "digital gold" maximalism, Ethereum built the smart-contract infrastructure that now underlies most of what Washington just legalized — which makes it politically load-bearing even as its price languishes. ## The asset (mid-2026) ETH peaked near $4,950 in August 2025, then fell roughly 70% — trading around $1,600 with a ~$189B market cap as of July 2026, badly underperforming Bitcoin (the ETH/BTC ratio hit a 10-month low in May). Spot ETH ETFs (trading since mid-2024) took in ~$12.9B in 2025; a joint SEC/CFTC release on March 17, 2026 classified staking rewards as non-securities, so staked-ETH ETFs are now live (BlackRock's ETHB launched around March 2026). Corporate ETH treasury vehicles rode the wave up and crashed with it: Tom Lee's BitMine holds ~5.7M ETH (~4.7% of supply) at a reported ~$6B paper loss, and Joe Lubin's SharpLink sits ~$1.7B underwater — the ETH echo of [[Michael Saylor]]'s [[Strategy]] playbook. ## The infrastructure Ethereum plus its L2 rollups (Base, Arbitrum, Optimism — ~90% of L2 activity) host most [[Stablecoin]] circulation in the post-[[GENIUS Act]] regime and anchor the [[Tokenization]] push: BlackRock's BUIDL fund runs on Ethereum, with tokenized money-market filings following in May 2026. Protocol development continues through the crash — Pectra (May 2025), Fusaka (December 2025, PeerDAS blob scaling), with Glamsterdam targeted for late 2026. DeFi TVL sits near $72B (Ethereum ~53% share) after H1 2026 bridge exploits topped $750M, led by the ~$292M Kelp DAO incident. ## The politics Buterin's "d/acc" (defensive/decentralized accelerationism) is an explicit counter to the [[Effective Accelerationism]] embraced by much of the tech right — he argues e/acc's path risks AI monopoly. The Bitcoin-maximalist vs. Ethereum rift is a real fault line inside crypto culture: BTC's hard-money, [[Blockstream]]-adjacent wing dismisses Ethereum as a "scam," while Ethereum's culture skews pluralist and institutional. The Ethereum Foundation itself churned through leadership in 2025–26 (Aya Miyaguchi to president; two co-executive directors installed March 2025, both gone within a year) amid treasury-management criticism. ## See Also - [[Bitcoin]] · [[Vitalik Buterin]] · [[Stablecoin]] · [[Tokenization]] · [[GENIUS Act]] - [[Effective Accelerationism]] — the ideology d/acc answers - [[Cryptocurrency Sector]] · [[Cryptocurrency Ecosystem]] · [[Cryptocurrency Lexicon]]