Toronto – Ethereum just finished most significant upgrade For more than a year, but the milestone came after a chaotic stretch for the blockchain. The Ether price (ETH) refused, the developers moved to rival platforms, and the Ethereum Foundation – a nonprofit project of the project – have face of criticism For a lack of coordination and vision.
Speaking at a coindesk conference panel in Toronto, Paul Brody – head of the Global Blockchain in Ey and Chairman of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance – and Josh Stark of the Ethereum Foundation, offered a more optimistic view of the road ahead.
There are two things the community is looking for, Stark said. First, “Ecosystem requires stronger leadership … stronger roadmap leadership, implementing that roadmap, and really help coordinating the ecosystem to deal with big challenges.”
Second, the network requires better messaging. “Ethereum’s grounds are not strong -believing strongly, but few people stand to tell the story of that ecosystem and boost the incredible thing built,” Stark said.
For all recent struggles, Stark and Brody maintained that Ethereum remains the most innovative and forward -focused crypto projects.
Brody suggested that concerns about the Foundation leadership were particularly overblown, giving the former Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation Aya Miyaguchi, the leading mark for his tenure, which began in 2018 and ended this year.
“Ethereum is a proof-of-stake chain with more than 120 layer-2 networks,” Broday said. The network capacity, he added, is close to “300 and 450 million transactions a day.” In addition, “L2 -level transaction fees – they average under one cent per transaction in the last three months,” Brody said. “If I turn around and look at the tenure (Miyaguchi’s) which is very objectively in terms of results, I will say a plus.”
Miyaguchi moved to the president of the Ethereum Foundation in March 2025, which installed HSIAO-wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak as the new co-executive director-Dant of A Adjusting the leadership aims to enhance the strategic focus of the foundation.
Some critics argue with Ethereum’s roadmap is highly dependent Layer-2 rollup – Independent blockchains that process transactions cheaply and quickly before “organizing” their history in the main chain of Ethereum. Brody defended the network’s rollup-centric roadmap: “I’m glad,” he said.
While layers-2 such as optimism, the base network of arbitrum and coinbase has lowered users’ fees-generally considered the main headwind to the broader adoption of the network-said skeptics that they also introduced the new security risks and obstacles to break -down that threatens the basic proposal of Ethereum value.
“The Ethereum is the Ethereum,” Brody said. “Which is it, acknowledge a problem. Fix it, and continue to the next problem. In terms of the biggest problem we have been talking about in recent years, this is size, right?
“All ecosystems will end with something like an L2 roadmap with modularity and experts,” Stark added. “We just went this path, and we found the twists and the turns and the challenges on that road, and we were talking to them.”
Ether (Ether), the network’s native token, has long been considered a blue-chip crypto asset. But in recent months, it has been incredible -related relatives in some competitors. Network tokens are often viewed as a proxy for the overall health of an ecosystem.
Bitcoin, mentioned by Stark, has successfully positioned itself as a reliable value store, helping it to welcome the market more desirable than Ethereum. “The Ethereum has a more complex narrative,” he said.
However, Stark expressed confidence that the market eventually reflects the deeper 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, but just like the real value proposal. And I think we’re starting to see it now. So I think the markets eventually are prices. And I think Ethereum is the most important project in Crypto and has always been.”
