One crypto analyst ruined a lot of people’s weekends with a single post about Ethereum’s money problems. What looked like basic number-crunching turned into a full-blown match between people who think the blockchain’s in serious trouble and die-hards who say it’s never been stronger.
AJC, an analyst at Messari—basically the Bloomberg of crypto data—dropped a bomb when he flat-out said Ethereum is “dying.” His proof? August’s fee revenue limped in at just $39.2 million, which is 40% less than last year and 75% below what it pulled in during August 2023. We’re talking about the network’s worst money-making month since early 2021, back when most people still thought Bitcoin was fake internet money.
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Ethereum fans went ballistic. They hammered AJC for fixating on one lousy stat while pretending nothing else exists. Yeah, Layer 1 fees are in the toilet, they said, but everything else is cooking. Layer 2 platforms are absolutely ripping, stablecoins like USDT and USDC won’t stop hitting new highs, and daily users keep climbing. Cheaper fees on the main network aren’t killing Ethereum—they’re making it actually usable for regular people.
The Upgrade That Broke Everything
This whole drama traces back to March 2024 and the Dencun upgrade. Ethereum basically rewired itself to make Layer 2 networks dirt cheap—these are like special fast-pass lanes built on top of the main blockchain. Users went crazy for it because suddenly they weren’t getting hammered with fees every time they moved money around.
Here’s the catch: while Layer 2s printed money, Ethereum’s core network started hemorrhaging revenue. Fees got cut in half, sometimes worse. That freaked out some investors who started asking hard questions about whether the whole model still works.
Henrik Andersson over at Apollo Crypto thinks the panic’s overblown. He fired back with his own numbers: Ethereum’s shuffling around $132 billion in stablecoins, processing mountains of transactions, and saw daily users jump to 552,000 by late August 2024—21% higher than last year. Show me a dying network that does that, he said.
AJC wasn’t having it. Fees are everything, period. They’re literally why ETH tokens have value, and counting users is just window dressing if the business fundamentals are broken. These two might as well be speaking different languages.
Nobody’s Counted Ethereum Out Yet
Funny thing is, we’ve been here before. A lot. Ethereum Obituaries—yes, someone actually tracks this stuff—has logged 150 predictions of Ethereum’s demise since 2014. Forty came just in 2024. Ryan McMillin at Merkle Tree Capital noticed these death calls always spike when things look ugly or some hot new competitor shows up.
McMillin’s not ready to write Ethereum off, but he admits the network’s stuck in no-man’s land. It’s not Bitcoin, which people hoard like digital bars of gold, and it’s not zippy and cheap like Solana. “Ethereum’s whole ‘ultra-sound money’ idea just couldn’t compete with Bitcoin’s stronger appeal as the toughest currency out there,” McMillin said, nailing Ethereum’s branding problem.
But check what the smart money’s doing. When Wall Street got its spot Ethereum ETFs in 2024, institutional cash poured in. The whales—those huge holders with absurd amounts of ETH—have loaded up 14% more since prices cratered in April 2025. They’re betting with real money, not hot takes on Twitter.
What this fight’s really about is something nobody’s settled: how do you even measure if a blockchain’s winning? Traditional finance guys want revenue and profit margins they can stick in a spreadsheet. Crypto natives obsess over network activity, developer buzz, and ecosystem growth. Both camps are dug in, and whoever’s right will probably dictate how people think about these networks for the next decade.
