Toronto – Ethereum has just completed its most significant update in more than a year, but the milestone occurs after a turbulent section for the block chain. The price of Ether (ETH) has decreased, developers have migrated to rival platforms, and the Ethereum Foundation, a non -profit administration of the project, has faced criticism for lack of coordination and vision.
Speaking in a panel at the Consenso de Coindesk Conference in Toronto, Paul Brody, global blockchain leader in EY and president of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and Josh Stark of the Ethereum Foundation, offered a more optimistic vision of the road ahead.
There are two things that the community is looking, Stark said. First, “the ecosystem needs a stronger leadership … a stronger leadership in the road map, in the execution of that roadmap, and really helps to coordinate the ecosystem to face the great challenges.”
Second, the network needs better messages. “Ethereum’s foundations are incredibly strong, but few people are standing to tell the story of that ecosystem and to boost the incredible things that are being built,” said Stark.
Despite all their recent struggles, Stark and Brody maintained that Ethereum remains the most innovative project focused on cryptography.
Brody suggested that the concerns about the leadership of the Foundation are particularly exaggerated, giving the former executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Aya Miyaguchi, the best brands for his mandate, which began in 2018 and ended this year.
“Ethereum is a stake test chain with more than 120 layer networks 2,” said Broday. The capacity of the network, he added, is about “300 and 450 million transactions per day.” In addition, “transaction rates at level L2: averaged a penny by transaction during the last three months,” Brody said. “If I pass and look at [Miyaguchi’s] Tenure in a very objective way in terms of the results, I would say that an advantage. ”
Miyaguchi made the transition to the president of the Ethereum Foundation in March 2025, installing Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak as its new executive directors, part of a leadership restructuring aimed at improving the strategic approach of the Foundation.
Some critics have argued that the Ethereum roadmap has been based too much on the Rolllups of Layer 2: Independent Blockchains that process transactions economically and quickly before “solving” its history in the Ethereum main chain. Brody defended the road map centered on the network network: “I am delighted,” he said.
While layers 2 such as optimism, the referee and the Coinbase base network have reduced user rates, generally considered the main wind for the adoption of the widest network, skeptics say they also introduce new safety risks and fragmentation obstacles that threaten the proposal of fundamental value of Ethereum.
“Ethereum is being Ethereum,” Brody said. “Which is, identifying a problem, solving it and moving on to the next problem. In terms of the biggest problem with which we were dealing in recent years, it was a scale, right? Going out of being able to make a million transactions per day to 450 million network capacity is excellent.”
“All ecosystems will end with something like an L2 roadmap with modularity and specialization,” Stark added. “We are the ones who have gone further along this path, and we find the turns and the turns and the challenges on that path, and we are dealing with them.”
Ethher (ETH), the native token of the network, has long been considered a cryptographic active of blue chip. But in recent months, it has had a lower performance in relation to some competitors. Network tokens are often seen as a proxy for the general health of an ecosystem.
Bitcoin, Stark said, has successfully positioned itself as a reliable value store, which helps to resist the market more favorably than Ethereum. “Ethereum has a more complicated narrative,” he said.
Even so, Stark expressed his confidence that the market would eventually reflect the deepest value of Ethereum.
“The world will not stop learning about these technologies and these systems,” he said. “The world will have an appetite for a slightly more complicated value proposal, but just as real value. And I think we are beginning to see that now. So I think the markets eventually the price value. And I think Ethereum is the most important project in cryptography and has always been.”
